


The Colors You Have

by AnonymousCatastrophe405



Series: Colors [2]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Adam Needs His Rest, Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Art School, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe- No Supernatural, Body Dysphoria, Cheating, Developing Relationship, Emotional Baggage, F/M, Falling In Love, Flower Crowns, Gen, Hospitals, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Cheating, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Underage Drinking, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Jealous Ronan, Jewish Character, Long-Distance Friendship, Long-Distance Relationship, M/M, Marijuana, Misgendering, Multi, POV Alternating, Past Abuse, Past Child Abuse, Past Relationship(s), Pre-Relationship, Secret Relationship, Self-Esteem Issues, Snow, State Fair, Suicide Attempt, Tad's Big Gay Crush on Adam, Timeline Shenanigans, Trans Character, Transphobia, Underage Drinking, Winter, county fair
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-11
Updated: 2018-04-16
Packaged: 2018-05-26 01:26:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 21,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6218194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnonymousCatastrophe405/pseuds/AnonymousCatastrophe405
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Drabbles, one-shots, and alternate POVs for "Color In Your Hands" that are responses to prompts, requests, and my own whims over on Tumblr.  Tags to be added as needed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. that's not my name

**Author's Note:**

> This is coming at you from the end of chapter 10 of CiYH, [“The One With the Juniper Tree”](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4033021/chapters/13513831). It’s also my first attempt at writing Tad’s POV, which will never pop up in the fic proper.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spring semester, March 2016.

_No Laura here, Mom. Try again._

_Oh, please, not this again._

Tad stares at his phone for a long moment and remembers, distantly, that his parents had been angry when he’d traded in the one they’d bought him for his and Lacey’s eighteenth birthday. A matching set with matching engravings, a gold and a rose gold, for the twins: “L.E.C., with love, Mom and Dad 9/9/2015″ in dainty script. It was perfect for Lacey. It was not perfect for Tad.

_No Laura here, Mom. Try again._

Maybe he was expecting too much from them to just be okay with this. He did legally change his name without telling them immediately after the birthday gift fiasco. 

And maybe Lacey was right, that Tad was kind of a stupid name. But it’s his. He chose it for himself. He didn’t really think that, miraculously, their parents would become okay with his transition if he’d chosen a name like Michael or Liam or Gregory.

Maybe he shouldn’t be surprised that his mother told him to stay in New York for spring break this year. It was awkward as fuck he’d been home for the winter, because they hadn’t realized he’d been so serious about the whole transitioning thing. 

_Oh, please, not this again._

They were still under the impression--as in in complete and total denial over literally everything--that he was just much, much less feminine than Lacey. Seeing him get off the plane with short hair and a flat chest and lifts in his shoes made them uncomfortable. Hearing the lower voice he’d started using made them really uncomfortable. 

Tad wonders if it really is impossible to teach old dogs new tricks. That would explain his parents going from tentative support to outright denial that they have a transgender son.

_No Laura here._

It was expecting an awful lot from them to deal with yet another holiday and another poorly timed period when they still couldn’t get his name or pronouns right.

He didn’t want to see his pregnant mother, anyway. If he had to look at the new nursery and all that forced gender binary color-coding bullshit and hear Mom and Dad gush about how excited they are to finally be having the son they’d always wanted, he would’ve found a way to jump off the Space Needle.

_Try again._

How his frigid mother managed to get knocked up in her fifties is a question best left to science fiction writers to answer. There has to be an alien or conspiracy theory at play here. 

He thought he’d be happier to become a big brother, but something tells him he’ll never have a relationship with the kid he’s going to be twenty years older than.

His phone rings while he’s staring blankly at it, and it startles him enough to make him drop it on the floor. It’s Adam, and the flutter of excitement in Tad’s stomach almost makes him forget he’d been brooding about his shitty parents and their stupid new baby. He wishes he had a picture of Adam to be looking at right now because it would cheer him up, but then he’d never manage to answer the phone because he’d be too distracted just having it under his fingertips. 

“Hey,” Adam says when Tad remembers his fine motor skills and answers the call. Tad’s not sure if it’s the suppressed twang in Adam’s voice he likes or if it’s the timbre. It might be both. It’s probably both. “I know a place that’s still serving if you still want a coffee.”

It’s definitely both.

Tad smiles. “Are you questioning my constant need for coffee? I always want coffee.” The mug on his desk is so hot he can still see the steam coming off it on his desk. If Adam is thinking coffee, Tad has more than enough to share. “But I’m back at my place and have a pot going already, so if you want you can come over and have some with me?” 

As much as he hopes Adam accepts the invitation, he knows that it’s unlikely. For a lot of reasons. As far as Tad can tell, Adam’s kinda-sorta not openly dating guys yet. “I mean, my roommates are partying in some other townhouse and I’m alone here if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I have to pass.” God dammit. “I was going to bring you one if you were still on campus before I headed home.”

“Aw,” Tad catches himself before he coos and touches his chest all dainty. He’s disappointed Adam’s not coming over, but he’s touched by the thought. It’s very polite and gentlemanly in a way Tad both aspires to and finds attractive. “That’s nice of you. Can I get a rain check? I’ll make it up to you over break.”

“How? Aren’t you going home?” Tad forgot he told Adam he was going back to Seattle for break when they had coffee at Nino’s the other day. 

“Nope. I’m staying here.” He clears his throat and starts the lengthy process of getting out of his binder for the day, rolling it from the bottom up as he speaks. “I, um, I’m sick. My parents thought it was better if I didn’t travel like this.” 

He can see his reflection in the mirror on the back of his door and turns away from it. There’s no one around to notice he’s suddenly grown boobs, and if Adam’s not coming by there’s even less reason to keep up appearances. Appearances that he desperately hopes aren’t going to become a problem if he’s going to try and get anywhere with Adam. Optimism is the single greatest cause of disappointment in Tad’s life. 

“That sucks,” Adam says. He sounds concerned in a way Tad hopes isn’t just being polite. Sometimes he wonders if Adam doesn’t like him much and it’s very anxiety-inducing. “What’s wrong?”

“Stomach ache?” Tad can’t think of a way to say he has cramps that doesn’t sound like food poisoning or a virus. “Yeah, a stomach ache. I’ll be fine, it’s just ruining my travel plans.” And his relationship with his parents, but what else is new? He just hopes that it doesn’t ruin how he thinks about Adam, or how Adam thinks about him. “Thanks for the concern, though.”

_Oh, please, not this again._

Tad is sick of things being complicated.


	2. before we belonged to anyone else, we were each other's

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two years ago, before Blue-Noah-Gansey and before Adam-and-Ronan, it had Blue-and-Adam. Adam-and-Blue. And they were very happy for a while.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> August 2014.

The entire world is nothing but warmth and the smell of summer-scorched grass and the living water of the creek and the wetlands, the far cries of songbirds Adam doesn't know the names of, the distant whir of farm equipment. If he concentrates, Adam can smell Blue’s hair on the wind and the sparse wildflowers she collected to make daisy chains with, the vehicular scent clinging to the blanket they're sitting on. The breeze is hot and vaguely unpleasant, but it breaks the oppressive stillness of the air. 

He can hear her breathing beside him. He can’t, really, but he imagines that he could and tries to recreate what that would’ve sounded--no, _sounds_ , it still exists even if not always for him anymore-- like before his hearing was completely unbalanced. It’s one of those quiet sounds he never noticed before that he misses desperately.

“Did your mom teach you to make those?” he asks. He has the sensation that his voice is very loud in the stillness of the field, because they’re so close he can feel Blue startle. Quieter, muffled even in his own head, he says, “Sorry.”

“Don’t be.” He knows she flapped her hand at him, but he can only see the blood vessels on the inside of his eyelids. “No, my cousin Orla did. Mom would kill the flowers before they could be made into crowns. She’s got a black thumb.”

He’s not sure if her answer disappoints him or not. “Mine, too.” 

She’s quiet for a moment. He opens his eyes to squint at her, unsure if he hadn’t heard her response, but the sad way she’s looking at him tells him she hasn’t said anything. There isn’t anything to say. He looks up at the sky. It’s smaller here than it is in the fields around the trailer park, where the endless, uninterrupted flatness and empty nothingness made the tall grasses seem to go on forever. This close to the mountains and the tree lines, this piece of farmland is framed on all sides create a square cut of brilliant blue summer sky. It is the color of a Lynch brother’s eyes, inherited from their storied father.

“Don’t make that face at me,” he says.

“I’m not making a face at you.” She sniffs indignantly.

“Are too.” Before she has a chance to say ‘are not’ he interrupts her, “No, you really are.”

Blue huffs. “So what if I am? Can you blame me?”

“Is it really so sad that my mom didn’t teach me to make flower crowns?” he asks. “‘Specially since yours didn’t teach you that, either?” He looks at her again. She’s wearing a crown now, and she wasn’t before. It’s singularly ugly, but it looks pretty on her because lots of singularly ugly things look pretty on Blue. “It's not like moms teach their sons things like flower crowns, right?"

Blue makes another face. "They could be. They should be. Fuck gendering flowers and not letting boys like them."

She's giving him a chance to change the subject before they tread too close to any of his open wounds. He sighs, because, while he's not a masochist, he feels peaceful enough right now to prod at them a little. "Well sure, I guess. But, like, my mom taught me other things. My dad did, too. It wasn't all bad all the time, but I think y'all think it was all bleak and depressing all the time. It really wasn't.”

Blue lays down next to him and her crown tries to slip off, but she holds it in place and readjusts it to stay on her head. She studies his face, and Adam hers. Her eyebrows are thick and expressive, but not in the makeup kind of way that seems popular with girls around campus, and one is always quirked a little higher than the other; it might just be because one always ends up the barest fraction more plucked underneath than the other, giving her the illusion of constant inquisitiveness. Knowing her, it might be intentional.

“So what was it like?” Her voice is soft and he almost has to ask her to repeat herself. She turns onto her side to face him and pillows her head on her folded arm. The flower crown falls off and she ignores it. He’s momentarily distracted by the way her knee lightly touches his thigh.

Adam chews on the inside of his cheek as he tries to piece together what he remembers from the only truly happy parts of his childhood. “My parents only got married because of me.” Blue’s expression is unreadable, but her eyes widen a little as if this surprises her. “They didn’t really know what they were doing, but they tried for a while, before things got bad.”

She reaches for his hand, linking her little finger with his. Adam adjusts their hands so she can hold his properly, their fingers laced together on his stomach, and she gives his fingers a little squeeze. He’s only told Blue the bare bones of his life before coming to school here, and she’s never asked or pressed him for details, but she seems to have pieced together enough to be sad for him. “Oh, Adam.” 

“Oh, Adam,” he repeats. He looks away from her and up at the sky, rubbing his eyes with his free hand. “I miss them. Sometimes. Is that wrong?”

“They’re your parents.” Her voice is a little flat, pragmatic but unhappy about it. “Even if they weren’t good ones, they still raised you. They were all you knew all your life.”

He nods. “Mostly I just miss my mom.” With an unfunny little laugh, he says, “Fuck my dad. I don’t miss him at all.”

Blue squeezes his hand. “Tell me about her?”

He does. He tells Blue about how he looks like his mother, about her music, about her terrible cooking and how he used to wake up to the sound of her hair dryer in the mornings when he was little and she still worked away from home. He talks about how she'd had a guitar and she taught him a few chords before the guitar disappeared, the first time she turned away and left the room when his father hit him, how she helped him get his first job washing dishes at a local diner when he was fourteen.

“She used to tell me to not say anything to anyone, about my dad hitting me,” Adam says. It’s the most he’s ever admitted out loud to anyone that she’d been complicit with his father’s abuse, that eventually she’d dealt Adam her own kind of assault. He looks up at the sky again and sits up, not releasing Blue’s hand. It’s solid, like an anchor, even though it’s small and soft in his despite how many rings she’s wearing. “I-I don’t--”

“It’s okay,” she tells him, speaking more loudly now that he’s a little further away from her. She sits up and leans against his shoulder, and she’s heavier than he thought she would be. “I won’t ask anything else.”

“But you will, I know you want to know.” 

“But not today.” She picks up her ugly flower wreath off and places it on his head. It’s itchy and smells like hot grass. “There you go.” She smiles and puts one of her hands on his cheek. “No more sad stuff today, okay?”

He nods and manages a little smile for her. “Yeah, okay.”

Blue lets him lay with his head in her lap for the rest of the afternoon and she keeps her fingers in his hair, so gentle it hurts him. He’s only been away from Henrietta for a little over a year, and every day makes his parents feel a little further away, the pain and fear a little more distant. The bruises are all long-faded and the old fractures long-set and the damage to his hearing long resigned to, but he sometimes forgets how close that part of his life really is. 

Having friends and a girlfriend, not just people to kill time and loneliness with, is not a balm he'd ever considered before. It's helping, in a million small ways. In one of his world art textbooks there's a section about how in Japan, broken pottery is sometimes repaired with gold to make the history of the broken piece a more beautiful part of it. It feels generous to think he's like one of those pieces of pottery, but there is something golden feeling about being with Blue and Gansey and Noah and Ronan. 

Blue traces the shell of his ear with her fingertip. “You know, Mother’s Day is next week.”

“I’m not sending my mom a card,” Adam mumbles against her stomach.

“I was gonna ask if you wanted to come home with me for it,” she says. “My mom’s been asking to meet you. And it might be nice to show you more of the state since you’ll be here for the foreseeable future, right?”

“I guess.” He opens his eye and squints up at her. “Has she really?”

“You’re the only boy I’ve ever talked to that’s been worth my time. She’s very curious.”

Adam isn’t sure he’s actually worth any of Blue’s time, but he’s glad she seems to think so. She’s generally disdainful of every guy she knows, and as prickly as she’d initially been towards his friends she’s warmed considerably to them despite wanting to punch Gansey and Ronan with regularity. 

“Am I invited?” he asks.

She seems puzzled by the question. “I asked, didn’t I?”

“I reckon I could come, if that’s really what you want.”

She smiles so brightly she almost glows, but it might just be the way the sun decides to illuminate her. “It is what I want.”

He sits up so they're eye to eye, even though he can't look into hers the way he wants to. "That settles that, then."

"Seems like." Her hand comes to rest on his jaw, her thumb rubbing over his bottom lip. He grazes his teeth over the pad and she giggles. "We do still need to decide if we're going back to your place or mine tonight, though."

"We could stay here." Blue's eyebrows disappear behind her bangs. "I have Gansey's camping stuff in my car from last weekend. We can go and get it all and spend the night right here. It'll be romantic."

"Adam Parrish, are you suggesting we have sex in Gansey's tent instead of in one of our beds?"

"Repeatedly, even. I'll have to carry you back to your place tomorrow morning."

She laughs, delighted at the possibility. "Where's the nice, sweet boy who sent me flowers and took me hiking for our first date? Is he gone or is he trying to get into my pants?" Adam answers her by ducking his head to kiss the spot behind her ear that makes her ticklish, and she does squirm a little against his chest as she pulls him closer until she has to lay down. Adam goes down with her and shifts to the side so she isn't pinned beneath him and kisses her neck again as he puts his other hand on her thigh, and she reads his mind and drapes it over his hip. Their mouths find each other's, without urgency. 

The skin between her knee high socks and her shorts is soft and slightly fuzzy, her hair softer than his own. It's not a thing he thought about before meeting her, that it would be strange for a girl to not shave or that it would bother other people if she didn't, and though he did wonder about it at first, it's never been something about Blue that he's disliked. Any wondering he'd done was because he couldn't believe he'd never put any thought to the expectation for women to be hairless and how senseless a standard it was. He decided months ago that he likes her very much because Blue is Blue. She doesn't shave and she has a little gap between her front teeth, she smells like lavender body wash and girl all the time. She has stretch marks and a soft, full body he can indent with his fingers without trying very hard, and the top of her head barely comes up to his collar bones and her hands are small and soft and lovely and always stained with fabric dye and her nail polish is always chipping. She is, in many ways, all the things that make him happy. Well, happy for him. Adam-happy and actually happy are very different things and neither is often caused by another person.

Being happy because of someone else is a weird feeling. He thinks, in the strange way of remembering people he once knew and spent time with but didn't actually like much, that the closest to this he'd ever felt before meeting Blue was with Brandy Corwin, when he was a sophomore in high school. She lived a few trailers away with her stepfather and her mother, and she'd wanted to go to culinary school and she was very thin and had crooked shoulders and a crooked smile and she was so tall her torso was too long and shirts could never totally cover her stomach. She taught him how to properly kiss under the bleachers at homecoming and they felt each other up under the blanket on her bed while they watched TV together. They'd ride their bikes out into the woods to go to where all the other teenagers went to be alone together, to fumble in partial privacy behind a tree because they had nowhere else to be mostly naked without getting caught and separated with a shotgun. 

He remembers liking Brandy because she liked him and let him touch her breasts and wanted to touch him in kind. In that regard, she and Blue are very similar in his mind, which is probably why he thinks of her more than he thinks of Shauna Marr, who only wanted to kiss in eighth grade, or Cassidy Norfolk, who dumped him when he said he didn't want to go to prom after a week of dating during their senior year. Both Brandy and Blue's affection was reciprocal and mutual, and that is an affection he is most fond of. 

Blue's hand is in his hair and she gives it a little tug to pull him back a little. "What are we gonna do for dinner out here?"

"Dunno," he mumbles against her mouth. "Pizza?"

"It's always pizza with you," she mumbles back. "You and your idiot friends are gonna get fat if you never eat anything else."

Adam bites her lip lightly. "I didn't realize you were so shallow, Blue."

She huffs a little and tugs his hair again. This time it makes him groan. "No avocado. I won't stand for it, that's not pizza."

Adam scoffs. Without Gansey around to ask for it, no one in their right mind would order avocado on a pizza. "I'll call it in in a few minutes."

The entire world is nothing but warmth and the smell of summer-scorched grass and the living water of the creek and the wetlands, the nearby cries of songbirds Adam doesn't know the names of, the distant whir of farm equipment. If he concentrates, Adam can smell Blue’s lavender body wash on the wind and the drying scent of the flower crown she'd made, the scent of her sweat. The breeze is cooler and vaguely pleasant, and it breaks the oppressive stillness of the air. 

He can hear Blue breathing under him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title for this one is a quote from Elizabeth Noble's _The Way We Were_ and it seemed very fitting.


	3. he's there in case i want it all

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s a garage down the street that has one of those young, hot mechanics that you usually only see in porn, and Tad has never been more annoyed to not have a car in constant need of repair.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> July 2015-April 2016
> 
> An anon on Tumblr dropped this in my inbox when I asked for prompts: "Possibly Tad's POV on why he likes Adam? (sorry I'm a sucker for Bella Swan!Adam)", and this is what happened.

There’s a garage down the street that has one of those young, hot mechanics that you usually only see in porn, and Tad has never been more annoyed to not have a car in constant need of repair. He’s even started walking more often just to have an excuse to take his time going by the shop, so he can ogle this guy more often.

It should be illegal to be that good looking. It should be illegal to look that good in those ugly utilitarian coverall things anyway, but now that it’s the middle of summer Hot Mechanic’s been wearing thin white tees and the upper half of the coveralls rolled down at the waist. It is a look if there ever was one, especially later in the day when his tee-shirt is a little damp. 

It’s a gorgeous day made for driving with the top down, and Tad is waiting for the light to change at the corner where the garage is. He catches Hot Mechanic’s attention while he’s near the edge of the lot.

“Nice car,” Hot Mechanic says. He had an accent and Tad forgets where he’s trying to go. “Is it an A5?”

“It’s an Audi,” is Tad’s brilliant reply. He’s actually glad when the light changed and he gets to drive away because he’s been mortified by his response. If he was Lacie, he would’ve smiled invitingly and offered to take Hot Mechanic for a ride in it sometime, but he’s not. He’s just Tad, who speaks before he thinks and says stupid shit to painfully hot guys who are trying to be nice.

—

Hot Mechanic is a student. Tad’s sees him on campus, sometimes carrying a portfolio and a box of supplies. He’s gorgeous and somehow manages to make an unsexy job sexy and he’s an artist. Or is at least taking an art class. It might be too much to hope that it’s a figure drawing class, but that doesn’t stop Tad’s imagination from running wild when he gets home at night. 

Tad has had crushes before. Tad has dated and had boyfriends before. Tad’s even lusted over strangers before. But he’s never, ever been this hopelessly horny for anyone before and Tad can only think about why that is after rubbing a few out to clear his head.

One: Hot Mechanic is the perfect storm of tall and lean that Tad finds universally attractive on anyone.  
Two: Hot Mechanic’s got that cozy, wholesome kind of blue-collar look that Tad has always liked and Lacie always used to make fun of him for.  
Three: Those biceps.  
Four: It’s so much simpler to not expect people to not be narrow-minded bigots.  
Five: Hot Mechanic has light eyes and lightish hair and a tan that makes them look even lighter.  
Six: This way is safer because Tad can’t expect just anyone to accept the facts of his body and what he intends to do to it over the next few years. 

—

He has a girlfriend.

Of course he has a girlfriend.

They’re holding hands on the quad and he’s smiling and leaning close to her and she laughs when she kisses him.

Tad can’t disappear into the library fast enough to find a quiet bathroom to cry in.

He figured that’s how things were, but it’s still, somehow, unbelievably painful to be confronted with it like this.

Locking himself in one of the stalls, he barely has a few moments to himself when the door slams open, the doorstop protesting the sudden violent swing with a groan. Someone stops to the sinks, and the door opens again.

“Fuck off,” the door slammer snaps. His voice is all knives and poison and fire. 

“It’s been a year,” the second guy says. Compared to the first guy, he sounds subdued and placid. “You’re still jealous?”

Tad backs up in the stall as far as he can, hoping they don’t realize he’s there. The angry sounding one sounds like he would most definitely kick Tad’s ass if he knew Tad was accidentally eavesdropping, dick or no dick.

The second guy speaks again. “Ronan, come on.”

“I hate her.”

“No you don’t. You just hate that she’s the one dating him, not you.”

The angry one, Ronan, makes an ugly, unkind sort of snort. “Like you don’t hate him.”

A moment passes before the second guy says, “I think he’s been hated enough for one lifetime, don’t you?” Tad wonders who they’re talking about. “Do you want me to say that I like her? I do. I really like her. But she’s dating my friend and they’re happy and that’s what’s important, not that I wish I’d met her first. She’s not a thing to have and neither is he, and you have to accept that.”

The door opens a third time. The quiet becomes tense and palpable, a living thing.

“What in the hell?” an accented voice says. Tad’s only heard him once, but he recognizes Hot Mechanic’s voice. He tries to not sniffle and wipes at his eyes with the heel of his hand, feeling caught out and stupid. “Y’all just took off.”

Ronan snorts. “Didn’t think you noticed.”

“Don’t do this,” the second guy says. “Not here, come on.”

“Of course I did,” Hot Mechanic says, ignoring the second guy. Tad suddenly has the sense that this is not a conversation he’s meant to be hearing. “You do it all the time. It’s old as shit, Ronan. I get that you’re jealous of her and all, but green’s not your color.”

“You son of a bitch,” Ronan fires back. “You think you know everything don’t you? You fucking don’t, okay?”

“You’re not as hard to read as you think you are.”

“Guys, seriously–”

“For a dumb fucking hick, you’ve got some ego.”

Hot Mechanic’s voice goes from warm to cold so quickly Tad almost isn’t sure it’s him at all. “You’re the one projecting here, not me. But what do I know, right? I’m just a dumb fucking hick.”

There are footsteps and the second guy says, “Adam, wait,” but the door is opening and closing and they’re alone again. Adam did not wait. The bathroom is so quiet Tad can hear the other two guys breathing.

“You don’t talk to people you love like that,” the second guy says. He starts to leave and stops. “You’re gonna be lucky if he even speaks to you again after this, and you brought it on yourself.”

“Good,” Ronan says. “I don’t care. He’d be doing me a favor.”

“You keep telling yourself that.” And then the second guy is gone.

Being alone with this Ronan guy is less than ideal, but Tad’s self-preservation instinct is in high gear, rattling around under his ribs and compelling him to stay put, but the aborted crying jag he’d come in here to have is threatening to bubble up again. He clamps his hands over his mouth to stifle himself, but he barely suppresses a squeak when there’s a sudden curse, a thud, the splintering sound of the mirror breaking, and a crack that sounds wet and bodily. 

Then it’s very quiet again. Tad shrinks back again even though there’s nowhere to go, afraid Ronan heard him gasp. On the other side of the stall door, Ronan swears again and hisses in pain. The bathroom door opens again, and Tad’s alone. Ronan hadn’t heard him. Tad doesn’t take the chance of getting caught again, so he gets his crying done as quickly as he can before anyone else comes in.

The takeaway from this, Tad realizes hours later, is that Hot Mechanic’s name is Adam and that one of his friends has a crush on him, too. 

—

It’s a little awkward, at first, when Tad meets the TA he’s interning under and realizes it’s the second voice he’d heard in the bathroom the other day, the one who likes Adam the Hot Mechanic’s girlfriend. His name is Noah and he’s really nice but kind of flaky, but he’s flaky in a way that’s clearly covering up for the fact that he seems to notice everything. 

Tad feels scrutinized whenever Noah looks at him and doesn’t say anything, but not in a way that feels judgmental. Curious, maybe, or considering, but not judged. 

“You’re not majoring or minoring in this department,” Noah says to him at the interview. “Why are you applying here instead of with Psych or Deaf Studies?” 

“I’m doing a work study for Psych,” Tad explains. “So I can’t intern for that, too. And D.S. doesn’t have interns, just a few tutors, but I’m not an upperclassman, so. Yeah. I can’t do that.”

“But why philosophy, then?”

Tad shrugs. He’d considered the choice a lot before he got the call to schedule the interview. “It’s a small department. Less than fifty majors a year. I figured I had a chance to help out here more than a bigger department that’s gonna have a bigger pool of applicants.”

Noah considers him for a long moment again, and then he smiles, pleased by Tad’s answer. “You’ll be the only intern this semester, actually.”

Tad blinks. “What?”

“We don’t have any new majors this year,” Noah explains. “Just the ones leftover from last year. We’re down to ten, so we only get one extra-departmental intern. And you’re the only person that applied for the position. Congrats, man.”

Tad honestly did not expect to get the job, much less to have no competition for it. But it’s an extra few hundred dollars in his scholarship stipend for the year, which is a few more hundred dollars towards hormone replacement therapy and more binders.

Working for Noah, and by extension the entire philosophy department, mostly means he helps Noah do teaching assistant things, which also mostly means not working in Noah’s windowless, closet-sized office. Noah is the TA who goes around campus on a skateboard, and Tad had seen him around during his first semester, but having to try following him on foot across campus while having conversations about the lectures and seminars they’re assisting with is a test of incredible patience, but it also means Tad spends a lot more time outside than he anticipated he would be doing this job. It’s a considerable upside, despite the headaches.

Noah’s friends come by the office a a lot, or always somehow manage to find them when they’re somewhere else on campus.

Tad is unexpectedly, somehow, on the periphery of Adam the Hot Mechanic’s social circle. 

—

Tad doesn’t talk to Adam very much, because he can’t quite seem to get a handle on the brain-mouth thing around him, and not only is it horribly embarrassing, but it seems like Adam doesn’t really like him much. 

This is fine, Tad thinks, because Adam has a girlfriend. Her name is a color, which is weird even to Tad, and she makes a lot of her own clothes. He can’t figure out what she’s majoring in. They’re cute together, at least at first, and then it gets exhausting–it seems like all of their friends are crushing on one of them. Noah likes Girlfriend, and so does their other friend Gansey (What is up with these names, Tad thinks, good god.), and Ronan, the one Tad’s never met, is the one with a thing for Adam. Tad had been inadvertently privy to Ronan and Adam falling out, and they aren’t currently speaking to each other. Noah says they can’t be in the same room without fighting right now, but this apparently normal-ish for them and no cause for alarm.

“Isn’t that a lousy friendship, though?” Tad asks once, while sitting with Adam because Noah wandered off to speak so someone else, leaving the two of them alone at their table in the cafeteria. Adam’s eyes narrow, in the calculating and kind of judgmental way they do sometimes, Tad amends, “I just don’t get it. Like, I’m bad at friendship and all, and it’s not really my place, but like, how do you stay friends with someone when you can hardly get through a week without coming to blows?”

Adam takes a long moment to answer. This, Tad has realized by now, isn’t some sort of hesitancy or uncertainty, but careful consideration for the words he’s going to use. Adam is a very deliberate person, even in small ways.

“It is, I guess,” Adam admits. “But you know that saying, about how blood is thicker than water?”

“You’re related?” 

“No, god, no. I mean, there’s more to the expression than that. ‘The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.’ The people you choose matter more than the ones who made you.” Tad stared at him. It sounded incredibly wise in a way Tad was not, regardless of whether or not Adam was just repeating something he’d heard or read somewhere. No one is really wise at twenty years old, after all. “Ronan and I, there was a choice there, once. It’s complicated. But he’s done more for me than almost anyone else ever has, and he does care, in a dickish kind of way. I figure that’s worth something in the long run even when we fight.”

It’s the most Adam has ever said to Tad. 

—

Tad knows from long exposure that Adam only hears out of one ear.

Adam favors his right side, tilting and turning his head just so when people are talking near him. He only uses the right earbud when he’s listening to music. In public, he orients himself to the right and puts his left side to walls. He’s a little clumsy and it’s difficult to catch his attention sometimes.

Tad knows he shouldn’t, but he asks around. Given how important hearing-assistive technology and ASL are back home, he can’t help but wonder if Adam’s being supported the way he should be.

He is and he isn’t. This is how Tad finds out Adam is stubborn as all get-out. He’s taken ASL courses and has a fairly basic fluency and he has permission to record all of his classes. He could probably try harder to get better at ASL, but he prefers to get by the way he always has. 

All Tad gathers is that he wasn’t born with SSD and he doesn’t have some kind of degenerative condition. In Tad’s experience, that means something happened.

It’s rude to say anything, so he doesn’t, but he has to try very hard to not fall into old patterns of signing as he speaks. He finds himself to Adam’s right a little more often.

The first time he signs anything at Adam is almost a year after Noah properly introduced them, in the counseling center’s waiting area, and Adam’s shock was apparent even under the slightly vacant mask he’d shown up wearing that morning.

—

Except for the day Tad learned his name, he’s never seen Adam angry before. Adam seems dedicated to being pleasant, but he’s a little aloof and sometimes even a little distant, but he’s also unfailingly polite. To see him irritated, especially in a public place, strikes Tad as so unlike him that he risks tripping a land mine to put himself in Adam’s way.

“Hi!” he says, laying on as much wary cheer as he can. Adam stops, and he doesn’t immediately seem like he’s going to just step around Tad and continue on his stormy way. “You look pissed.”

“I am pissed,” Adam says. He doesn’t elaborate.

Tad risks putting his hand on Adam’s arm. His bicep is just as nice to touch as it is to look at. “You wanna talk about it?”

Adam, very clearly, doesn’t want to talk about it, but he doesn’t shake Tad’s hand off. Tad pulls on him a little. “Come on, I was gonna go to Cafeteria. Come with me.”

Cafeteria is the coffee shop-slash-guitar store-slash-favorite place to study on Main Street. Noah brings him here a lot when they’re doing TA-slash-intern work, because the coffee is good and the atmosphere is slightly industrial, very eclectic, cozy as all get-out, and almost church-like because it has stained glass and vaulted ceilings. 

Tad hands the girl behind the counter his punch-card. “Next one’s free,” she says. She looks at Adam. “You wanna redeem that now, or…?”

Tad looks at Adam. Adam looks at the punch card in the barista’s hand. Tad nudges Adam. “It’s free. Help me free up my wallet a little?”

Adam seems to fight silently with himself for a few seconds. “Do you not want it?”

“I want a fresh punch card,” Tad replies. “Otherwise I’m gonna let her decide who gets my free one today.”

Adam fights with himself again. To the barista he says, “Medium black, please, with no room for milk.”

She pours him his coffee into a paper cup as Tad leaves a five dollar bill on the counter. It’s overkill, but the tip jar looks a little empty to him for this time of day. 

“Thanks,” Adam says as he waits for Tad to fix his own cup. 

“Don’t mention it,” Tad says. He empties the carafe of creamer and hands it to the barista. “It didn’t cost me anything.” Adam looks a little pointedly at the now full tip jar, which they can see from the table they sit down at. 

Tad watches the girl at the counter as she helps someone else. “My first job was at a place like this. I don’t know if they split their tips here, so I try to make sure everyone gets something at the end of the night if they do. Or, you know, some people are just cheap and don’t tip, so it’s kinda making up for them, too.”

He’s not sure why he’s telling Adam this, because there’s no reason to defend tipping generously, but he can’t help but feel like he needs to justify it to not seem careless with his money.

Adam doesn’t say anything for a long moment, taking the first few sips of his coffee a little gingerly because it’s so hot. “Where are you from?”

“Seattle, basically. The ‘burbs. I grew up two houses down from where Kurt Cobain died, which is kinda neat, if you like morbid music industry trivia.”

“It’s neat anyway,” Adam says, smiling just the tiniest bit. “I like Nirvana.”

“So do most people if they have any taste.” That makes Adam smile a little more. Tad attempts to drown the butterflies in his stomach with a few sips of coffee. “What about you?”

Adam raises his eyebrows on the other side of his cup. “What about me?”

“Where are you from?”

“Nowhere.” It comes out easily, like it’s a reflex to not answer that question. “A place made for leaving, which I did, so it doesn’t matter anymore.”

Tad leans his chin on his palm. “Does the whole evasive-mysterious ‘I’m not from anywhere’ thing actually work on anyone? Because you have an accent, buddy, it’s kinda a giveaway.”

Adam laughs. Actually laughs. “Yeah, no, it doesn’t. West Virginia.”

The heart of Appalachia. It explains the not-quite southern accent he has, because it’s not the kind Tad’s been conditioned to expect to hear from television. He seems self-conscious of it, but Tad can only attempt to guess why.

“I hear it’s beautiful,” Tad says. “With the mountains and the national parks.”

Adam sighs. “It is. It’s pretty here, too, and it reminds me a lot of home, but it’s not the same. You wouldn’t believe the colors the mountains turn in the fall, or how loud thunder can be.”

“I’ll have to go someday and find out for myself.”

“You should.”

They’re quiet for a few minutes as they people-watch and drink their coffee. Tad is almost expecting Adam to leave without warning, but after a while he sighs heavily.

“Some people,” he says, “Are impossible.”

When he doesn’t go on, Tad tries to encourage him to. “People people, or a specific person people?”

“Person people,” Adam says. “Ronan people.”

“What’s he done now?”

Apparently, it’s more what he hasn’t done than what he has done. It’s a little hard to listen to, especially since Adam’s very obviously restraining himself when it comes to both word choice and the level of detail he’s providing, but Tad is able to get enough broad strokes from him to get a rough sketch of the big picture. It’s the most talking Tad’s ever heard Adam do, and the more he talks the less suppressed his accent is, and by the time he’s finally starting to wind down, he’s all long vowels and sawed-off ends of words and strangely quaint idioms Tad’s never actually heard anyone say before.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to go on and on like that.”

“No, it’s fine!” Tad gestures with his cup and briefly panics because he forgot it was empty. “You needed to vent, I don’t mind being the one to hear it.”

“Thank you,” Adam says, so earnestly it nearly makes Tad flush. “I should return the favor sometime.”

Tad scoffs. “Oh, please, you don’t actually want to hear me bitch for an hour about my parents.”

“You don’t actually want to hear me bitch about Ronan, either, but you did.” Adam has that considering look on his face, but it’s somehow less judgemental than it usually is. It’s curious, more than anything. “You didn’t have to.”

“I wanted to, because you looked like you needed to.”

“Is it that simple?”

“Yeah, kinda. Like, don’t get me wrong, I’d rather not hear you complain about the guy who won’t make a move on you after two years, but like, I’m happy to listen.”

Adam makes a thoughtful kind of ‘huh’ sound. “We should do it the other way ‘round sometime, where I listen to you.”

Tad’s palms are suddenly very sweaty. “I’d like that.”

He takes out his cellphone, an older model Android that’s a little bigger and bulkier than Tad’s iPhone. He looks expectantly at Tad. “I’m a little rusty, but this is where we do the number thing, right?”

“Uh,” Tad fumbles to get his phone out of his pocket. “Right.”

Adam smiles and Tad briefly forgets his phone number.

—

For working in a garage, Adam’s car is a piece of shit. 

Three different companies seem to have donated parts, and none of them particularly attractive because the majority of it seems to be an unfortunate looking early nineties Honda Tad remembers his dad once had. The whole thing is a sickly sort of faded teal color that both suits Adam and completely doesn’t, because Adam got sick of it being three different colors and painted the whole thing the only color at the garage no one would miss.

He still thinks Tad has a nice car, though. He asks about it, sometimes. Tad offers to let him drive it around town once, and Adam declines, very politely, and makes a comment that they don’t know each other well enough for that.

Tad didn’t think there was anything particularly intimate about driving someone else’s car, but Adam and Noah’s friends seem to. No one can drive Gansey’s old Camaro except for Adam’s Girlfriend Indigo, and no one but Ronan can drive the sharp early 2000s BMW that Tad’s seen around campus. No one wants to drive Adam’s car because it’s barely road worthy, and only seems to be functional because of who it belongs to. 

“You can borrow it, really,” Tad tells him. “I don’t mind. I like walking anyway.”

“I can’t drive stick,” Adam replies, “But thanks. I’d look weird behind the wheel of an Audi anyway.”

“Are you kidding?” Tad asks. “Get a pair of fancy shades on you and you’ll look like an ad for the company.”

Adam smiles, just a little, like the sentiment pleases him even though he disagrees. “Still trying to get that date, huh?”

Tad looks down at their shoes and leans against the side of Cafeteria. Inside, he can hear the murmur of conversation and plucked strings. Adam leans against the window beside him with his hands behind his back. 

“It would be nice,” Tad admits. “I won’t lie, like, that would be awesome, but like, I know you’re kinda, you know, with that other guy.” Adam blinks, clearly taken aback. Tad panics internally and flails to recover. “Oh shit, was I not supposed to know that? I’m sorry, I take it back, I didn’t say anything. I don’t know anything, really.”

“No, no, it’s fine. We–I just, we haven’t really done anything about it yet. I didn’t think anyone knew.”

Most people aren’t looking as hard as Tad is, probably. He shrugs. “Intuition, I guess. I mean, I didn’t really think I’d ever get that date.”

Adam’s brow furrows. “How come?”

“Well, like, I don’t…” Tad trails off. He never shuts up when he should, but somehow talking seriously about anything leaves him speechless. “Considering how I am, I figured it was kind of a lot to expect from anyone just yet, to be okay with it, I mean.”

“That’s fine,” Adam says. “That doesn’t matter to me.”

Tad’s heart and lungs and stomach all switch places without warning. “It doesn’t?”

“No. And it shouldn’t, if someone really likes you.” Adam shifts to cross his arms over his chest. “Maybe that’s just me, I don’t know.”

Suddenly it’s unbearable that he’s not going to get that date after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Cafeteria](http://cafeteriacoffeehouse.com/) is a real place! And [this](https://www.instagram.com/p/80JatfIeTa/?taken-by=official20something/) is what it looks like inside, courtesy of my Instagram. It's practically next to a real college that I've grossly expanded upon to accommodate my own imagination!


	4. we hang like sneakers from the power line

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s not cheating. I’m wearing it, aren’t I?”
> 
> “With your regular length shirt under it, Adam, Jesus Christ,” Noah says. He’s sitting on the windowsill that opens onto the fire escape with a joint, as he has been for the last hour.
> 
> “It wasn’t gonna happen otherwise, so y’all are gonna have to deal with it this way.”
> 
> “It still constitutes cheating,” Blue insists. “Someone invoke a penalty for not following through on my dare properly.”
> 
> “Party foul, man. Total party foul,” Henry says, with great solemnity. Noah makes an approving finger gun at Henry from across the room.
> 
> From his desk, Gansey twists his swivel chair listlessly from side to to side. “This is the kind of nonsense we only get up to when Noah talks us into smoking, you realize.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spring semester, April 2016. Gansey's birthday.
> 
> An anon on Tumblr requested Ronan's reaction to Adam wearing a crop top, and the only way I could imagine that happening was if it was a dare and somehow everyone's inhibitions were slightly lowered. So this is what became of that.

“Is that-?” Blue looks at Henry for confirmation. “That’s gotta be cheating.”

“It’s totally cheating,” he confirms.

“Aw, c’mon.” Adam holds his arms out to his sides, causing the crop top to lift a little higher on his chest. It’s slightly longer in the back, a thin and almost ridiculously soft wrinkle-free cotton blend in a pleasingly neutral medium gray, and the chest bears, in very large and very vividly pastel letters, the word ‘unicorn’. It’s the only crop top in Monmouth, it’s Blue’s, and it happened to be just oversized enough for him to try on without stretching it out for the sake of satisfying the dare. “It’s not cheating. I’m wearing it, aren’t I?”

“With your regular length shirt under it, Adam, Jesus Christ,” Noah says. He’s sitting on the windowsill that opens onto the fire escape with a joint, as he has been for the last hour.

“It wasn’t gonna happen otherwise, so y’all are gonna have to deal with it this way.”

“It still constitutes cheating,” Blue insists. “Someone invoke a penalty for not following through on my dare properly.”

“Party foul, man. Total party foul,” Henry says, with great solemnity. Noah makes an approving finger gun at Henry from across the room.

From his desk, Gansey twists his swivel chair listlessly from side to to side. “This is the kind of nonsense we only get up to when Noah talks us into smoking, you realize.”

“Excuse you, Richard the third,” Noah says. He sounds fairly annoyed, which is a feat considering how stoned he is right now and how ungiven to annoyance he always is. “I didn’t talk anyone into anything.” He flaps his hand at Adam. “Sit down, you’re making me nervous.”

Adam laughs as he reclaims his seat on the couch. “That’s the pot, man.”

Noah makes a peevish sound. “Yeah, well, I’m nervous anyway. Sit.”

“Penalty,” Blue says. She points, imperious and queenlike, at Adam and he has the grace to look chastised. “Noah, close the window so Adam can do the dare right.”

“Why am I hot-boxing the living room?”

“Because Adam gets cold easily and Ronan isn’t here,” Gansey replies. 

“Hey!” Adam says. When Blue sighs at him, he sighs too, because he knows she’s right. “I’ll take the other shirt off. Please don’t hotbox the living room. The contact high is bad enough.”

Blue grins toothily. “Attaboy. Noah, give me that, stop hogging it.”

Adam pulls the crop-top off carefully–it feels flimsy and insubstantial in his coarse hands– as Noah gets up to give Blue the joint. They shotgun first and Gansey turns as red as his polo shirt; Adam is glad to get to hide his own flush under his other shirt as he pulls it over his head, but then Blue whistles at him and he feels it intensify.

“Where is our man Lynch?” Henry asks. The big bottle of fancy lemonade he mixed with some fancy lemon-lychee vodka and tonic water is significantly diminished, and he’s draped artlessly on the nest chair they pulled out of Ronan’s room.

“Running, I think,” Gansey says, a moment too late, when he’s able to look away from Blue and Noah. “He left in sweats and he didn’t bring his gym bag.”

“Kind of late for that, isn’t it?”

“He left before the sun started going down, he’ll probably be back soon.”

As if summoned, Ronan slams the door open, as he always does, because Ronan Lynch has never not slammed a door that could withstand such treatment. “It reeks of pot in here.”

“Noah had a bad day,” Henry says. “It’s Monday, you know how it is.”

Ronan shakes his head and heads for the bathroom, pausing to take the joint from Blue’s hand to take a drag from it despite her protests. 

“That’s smart,” Adam says. “Get high and shower, nothing bad can happen.”

“I don’t need your backtalk, science guy,” Ronan says. The expression on his face when he looks at Adam is, for him, open and confused and flushed in a way that doesn’t seem caused by his run. “What the fuck are you wearing?”

Adam plucks at the shirt. “I’m trying to figure that out, myself.”

“He did a stupid thing and took one of Blue’s dares,” Gansey explains. 

“I lucked out, though, it’s not as bad as the time she made you drink a jar of pickle juice.”

Gansey groans weakly and goes a little green. “Please don’t remind me.”

Ronan leans on the back of Blue’s chair. “I don’t recommend making that look a regular thing, Parrish. I can see your ribs.”

“He says that like it’s a problem,” Noah says. He waggles his eyebrows at Adam when Adam and Ronan glare at him. 

Henry gestures with his lemonade concoction at Ronan. “No, no, he’s right. That’s a look best left to guys with, like, six-packs and those cute back dimples.” His expression brightens. “Like you, Mr. Lynch.”

“Do you have a death wish?” Ronan asks him.

“No, Henry’s right,” Blue says. “Adam’s too skinny, it just looks stupid on him.”

“I told you it would,” Adam says. 

Ronan rolls his eyes and continues to the bathroom. “It’s a stupid look anyway.”

“Says you,” Gansey says, surprising everyone, including himself.

“I love when we play truth or dare,” Noah says. “Gansey always makes it fun.”


	5. some might say love without touching

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Declan wants him admitted for the next few days. Ronan says it was an accident and he doesn’t need to stay.”
> 
> There’s nothing accidental, Adam thinks, about what’s happened over the last few hours. “What do you say?”
> 
> Under the harsh hospital lights and the echo of fear and his general sleeplessness, Gansey looks like a little boy playing at being an adult. 
> 
> “I’m very glad he’s still here to argue with Declan.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fall semester, November 2014. 
> 
> Someone requested Adam, Ronan, and blood as a prompt fill on Tumblr. So, like, this was brutal and, really, barely has any interaction between Adam and Ronan at all. The aftermath of a suicide attempt is not something I’ve ever written before and, I won’t lie, I did get emotional writing this because I’ve come very close to being in this position myself.
> 
>  
> 
> _Content/trigger warnings for blood and Ronan’s suicide attempt._

Adam doesn’t really remember the last time he was in an emergency room, only that he’d walked out of it homeless with a lot of medical debt and informative pamphlets on permanent hearing loss, head trauma, American Sign Language, and aural implants. It is a decidedly different experience to sit in the waiting room rather than one of the exam rooms, waiting to hear what will happen to one of his best friends. 

Noah is in shock now that the immediate crisis has passed. He had blood on his clothes and hands and face and in his hair the last time Adam saw him, before Blue took him someplace else in the hospital to clean up and process what’s happened tonight. Adam doesn’t think Noah has blinked more than a handful of times since they arrived behind the ambulance. He’s probably going to need therapy after this, like Ronan will.

Never once did Adam think Ronan would try to kill himself, but especially not like this. Not on a Tuesday night when he had a critique in the morning, with Noah in the other room and Gansey half a world away in Washington. 

He wonders if something like this voids a security deposit. He wonders what will become of the mattress, if some bum somewhere will end up sleeping on a bloody bed that belonged to a kid with a multimillion dollar trust fund. Adam wonders why thoughts like those don’t bother him and if he should feel guilty about not being horrified by them. He wonders what it says about him.

After a while, Gansey comes out from behind the privacy curtain around Ronan’s bed. Declan does, too, but he follows a doctor through a door at the other end of the room. Adam stands up and meets Gansey halfway down the corridor.

“He’s fine,” Gansey says, without being asked anything. His hands are shaking, betraying the calm and businesslike tone of his voice. “Declan wants him admitted for the next few days. Ronan says it was an accident and he doesn’t need to stay.”

There’s nothing accidental, Adam thinks, about what’s happened over the last few hours. “What do you say?”

Under the harsh hospital lights and the echo of fear and his general sleeplessness, Gansey looks like a little boy playing at being an adult. 

“I’m very glad he’s still here to argue with Declan.”

He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. “Visiting hours are over, but the doctor said we can see him for a bit before they move him upstairs for the night. Where are Blue and Noah?”

“The cafeteria, I think,” Adam tells him. 

“I’ll find them.” He attempts to smile, but it doesn’t do anything for his face. “He was asking for you in the ambulance.”

Adam isn’t sure he’s happy to hear that Ronan was asking for him while he was almost dying. Walking down to Ronan’s bed feels mechanical, and Adam isn’t sure how he gets from where he’d been with Gansey to the chair beside the hospital bed and monitors around Ronan. Aside from the slightly grayish pallor and the thick bandages and cuffs around his wrists, he almost looks the same as he always does.

No, that’s not true. He’s not usually so vulnerable looking, so feral-eyed and trapped. He watches Adam sit down beside him. 

“They ruined my favorite shirt,” he says, attempting to sound conversational and failing. He lifts his arm as much as he can to show Adam the torn, bloody sleeve above the bandages. “You think insurance covers shit like that?”

“I don’t know,” Adam says. He leans his elbows on the edge of the mattress, almost touching Ronan’s leg but not quite. He wants to be angry, but really he’s just glad that Gansey was right: Ronan’s still here. Adam nudges Ronan’s knee with one of his elbows, then rests his head on his arms. 

Ronan touches his head with his fingertips, just for a second. It’s completely wrong and somehow comforting because of it. 

All Adam can think of to say is, “Why?”

“It’s not like that,” Ronan says. “I swear.”

Adam looks up. He can’t tell if Ronan is lying or not. He puts his head down again, and this time, when Ronan touches him, he lingers.


	6. i like where you sleep when you sleep next to me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ronan feels like he’s been taught an important lesson, or that he’s taken on a mantle Blue has gladly passed on to him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spring semester, February 2016.
> 
> An anon asked me to write something about either Adam or Ronan falling asleep on the other one's lap, and this is the result of that.

Adam falling asleep at inopportune times, in slightly inappropriate places, is par for the course of being his friend. If he’s not passing out on the couch at Nino’s during the midday rush, he’s doing it in the back of Gansey’s car on the ten minute drive from campus to Monmouth. Or in his studio when he’s working, or in the office at Boyd’s when he was only supposed to be printing an estimate out, in the library when he’s trying to study. 

Or on Ronan’s lap, without warning, while they’re all trying to watch a movie.

Gansey turns around to say something to Ronan when he sees Adam. He does a horrible job trying not to smile. He whispers, “When did that happen?”

“Like five minutes ago,” Ronan whispers back. Noah and Blue turn around to see the cause of the whispering, and Noah’s look of delight is appalling. Adam has dozed off on all of their shoulders before, but this, his head in Ronan’s lap, is entirely new. Ronan’s glad the lights are off because his face feels very warm, which means it’s also very pink. 

Blue turns away from the TV and leans on the seat of the couch, her arms folded in front of her, her chin resting on them. With a very gentle touch Ronan suspects she perfected when she’d still been dating Adam, she touches his hair where it’s cut around the shell of his ear, between his eyebrows to smooths away the little crease between them. Adam makes a contented sound and turns his face against Ronan’s thigh. She smiles and looks up at Ronan. She looks like she really and truly knows him. 

Ronan feels like he’s been taught an important lesson, or that he’s taken on a mantle Blue has gladly passed on to him. 

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Noah and Gansey exchange another smile and turn back to the movie, granting Blue and Ronan a little privacy. 

“He’s totally out,” Blue murmurs. “You can move and get up and stuff and he won’t even notice.”

Ronan doesn’t need to tell her that he doesn’t need to, because he knows she understands. 

She gets up on her knees and reaches for one of Ronan’s hands where they’re resting on the back of the couch. Her palm is a little slick with butter from the popcorn she was sharing with Noah. She moves Ronan’s hand to the curve of Adam’s ribs, and somehow feeling the ridges of bone expanding and contracting with his breath and the distant thump of his heart beating is the most intimate thing Ronan’s ever experienced. “He likes that.”

“Why should I care what he likes?” Ronan asks, bullishly, because he feels the need to front that this is an inconvenience. 

Blue pinches the thin skin on the back of Ronan’s hand. “Don’t be a shitbag.” 

“My leg is asleep.”

“Bless you,” Blue says, and if Adam was awake he’d snort, “For suffering so terribly.” 

Ronan feels like he understands suffering well enough, and if losing the feeling in his right leg is just the next in a long series of torments the universe has bestowed upon him, he is glad to endure it for this.


	7. every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adam’s positive he misheard. Strangely, though, he’s not upset by what he thinks Noah said. In a way it makes him feel weightless, like a helium balloon.
> 
> “Wow,” he says. Noah nods, like he can’t quite believe it, either. “Damn. Does she know? Does Gansey?”
> 
> “No. I haven’t said anything because, like, that’s huge. Too huge. You guys are all so young, you’re not thinking about stuff like that yet, it feels wrong to put that on them when it’s just me realizing I’m getting old as balls.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spring semester, April 2016. Takes place between chapters 20 and 21.
> 
> Anon wanted Adam and Noah bonding, and instead of writing something nice I made myself incredibly sad. Whoops.

Somehow, it fell to Adam to drive Noah to Kingston on an errand he doesn’t quite understand the purposes of, and somehow, they’ve been at their destination for ten minutes without going inside yet. It’s raining so hard they can hardly see the parking meter next to Adam’s mirror, thundering against the roof of the car and making the seam between the rear window and the roof of the car leak listlessly onto the backseat. Over the music blasting and crackling through the Hondayota’s speakers, it’s impossible to hear the drip drip drip plunking against the balding fabric of the cushion.

On the stereo, Thurston Moore goes on and on about a teenage riot. Noah’s singing is clear and only slightly off-key in a way that’s not entirely unpleasant. Adam, who is probably tone-deaf in addition to being half-deaf, is pretty sure he sounds like a dying animal but it doesn’t stop him in the slightest. At least he has a decent sense of rhythm as he drums along to the beat on the steering wheel. Noah is dancing a little in his seat. 

Neither of them are old enough to remember this song playing on the radio; Noah is just barely old enough to know Sonic Youth was still popular when he was a baby, and Adam is just barely young enough to have only known them by reputation and peerage before he hunted their old catalog down to put it on his phone. The important part is that they both know it and have both known all the others that played on the drive here.

It’s still pouring sheets when the track changes to “Happy When It Rains”. Adam switches from drumming on the steering wheel to playing air guitar to the opening riff, and Noah laughs so hard he starts to choke a little.

When he sobers up, he lowers the volume slightly and shouts, “This song reminds me of Blue.”

Adam lowers the volume even more. “She hates The Jesus and Mary Chain, though.”

“So? It’s the lyrics at the beginning that remind me of her.” 

Adam restarts the song to try and see what Noah means. The rain is starting to let up a little, so he lowers the volume a third time now that it’s not being competed with. He keeps Blue in mind, imagining her as the sweet thing, the her in the song, and by the time it moves from the first verse to the chorus Adam understands what Noah means completely.

“Can I tell you a secret?” Noah asks. When Adam nods, because of course Noah can tell him anything, Noah says, “I wanna marry her.”

Adam’s positive he misheard. Strangely, though, he’s not upset by what he thinks Noah said. In a way it makes him feel weightless, like a helium balloon.

“Wow,” he says. Noah nods, like he can’t quite believe it, either. “Damn. Does she know? Does Gansey?”

“No. I haven’t said anything because, like, that’s huge. Too huge. You guys are all so young, you’re not thinking about stuff like that yet, it feels wrong to put that on them when it’s just me realizing I’m getting old as balls.”

Adam frowns a little, but Noah’s watching someone walking through the rain across the street and doesn’t see it. “So why put that on me?”

Noah shrugs. “I guess I thought you’d understand. You told me you wanted to marry her once, too.”

He had. He’d only told Noah because he thought Noah would understand, because Noah was older. Noah had told him, quite bluntly, that that was begging for disaster when they were only nineteen and had only been dating for a year. Now Adam understands that Noah’s bluntness had been what he’d needed to hear, but at the time he’d been furious at the imagined insinuation that they’d end up like Adam’s parents, who married pointlessly young, too. 

The rain has let up enough to be able to make out the storefronts they’re parked in front of. There’s a jewelry store a few yards away, with a sparkly window display and expensive-looking silk flowers behind the glass. 

“Is that why we’re here?” Adam asks. He nods towards the glittering storefront. 

Noah follows Adam’s gaze and shakes his head. He points at a restaurant catty-corner to the jewelry store, across the street. “We’re here for that.”

“Did you stealth get me to go on a date with you? Is that why you’re all dressed up?”

“Ew, no, I’m not Ronan.” Despite making the joke, Noah doesn’t laugh. “Someone I used to know is in there. Waiting. I’m supposed to be interviewing with her. For an adjunct position.” Noah opens his mouth to continue and stops himself, several times, before he manages to say, “It’s at Berkeley.”

Adam feels like the wind has been knocked out of him. Noah looks like he has, too. It’s stopped raining but he makes no moves to get out of the car to go to his interview.

“I don’t want to go,” Noah says, almost to low to hear. 

Even though it pains him, Adam only has one thought in his head. “You have to. You need to. You’ll never forgive yourself if you let the opportunity go.”

Noah nods, because he knows Adam is right. He knows Adam knows he’s right, because Adam knows that regret from experience. It takes him a few moments longer, and then he opens the car door.

It’s starting to rain again as Noah crosses the street. Adam turns off the stereo halfway through “Good Riddance” and waits for Noah to return in silence.


	8. feel me up against your bones

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You want me to do _what?_ ” Blue asks, laughing someplace on the other side of her bathroom door.
> 
> Noah leans his palms and forehead against the door. “Come on, you brought it up first.”
> 
> There’s movement inside. “I was joking when I said that.”
> 
> He groans a little and rubs his head against the textured contact paper covering the door’s ugly wood laminate. “I know. But I thought about it and I think it would be awesome.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spring semester, March 2016.

“You want me to do _what?_ ” Blue asks, laughing someplace on the other side of her bathroom door.

Noah leans his palms and forehead against the door. “Come on, you brought it up first.”

There’s movement inside. “I was joking when I said that.”

He groans a little and rubs his head against the textured contact paper covering the door’s ugly wood laminate. “I know. But I thought about it and I think it would be awesome.”

The door starts to open and he has to catch himself on the frame to not fall forward. She looks up at him with a crooked little one-dimpled smirk, wet from the shower and wearing a towel with a unicorn on it. She smells like lavender. Noah leans to one side of the door and looks down at her, and sighs.

“You’re so pretty,” he says. 

She flicks a section of her wet hair over her shoulder and steps around him. “I know.” Sometimes she sounds just like her cousin in ways that would probably annoy her if anyone ever pointed them out, but he likes it when it comes from Blue and not Orla. When he follows her into her bedroom, she’s walking around in bright yellow underwear with prominent pink seams as she combs her hair. 

“Would you really let me do that?” She meets his eye in the mirror, but she looks a little more hesitant than she did a moment ago. 

“Is it still letting you if I’m the one asking for it?”

She sets her comb aside and turns to him. If any of her neighbors were in their backwards, they could look into her window and see them, see her standing in front of him in nothing but her underwear, petite and full and brown and freckled. Neither of them would care. 

It’s starting to get nice out, cool enough that there’s no need for air conditioning and warm enough to keep the windows open, and a breeze gives her goosebumps. He sits on her bed and holds his arms out for her to keep her warm, and she goes to him. 

“I mean it,” he murmurs against her sternum. “It’s not like I haven’t already kinda done it before, and I did like it.”

Blue’s fingers card through his hair, pushing it away from his face. “What I proposed isn’t exactly the same thing.”

He shrugs. “Close enough, though. Doesn’t change how I feel about trying it.”

“I’ve never done it before, either,” she admits. “I can’t guarantee it would be any good.”

“So? Practice makes perfect.” He puts his hands on her ass and it makes her laugh, an unselfconscious thing that’s a little nasal and ugly and entirely adorable. “You’ll get the hip motion down in no time.” 

“Your hands are so cold,” she says as she climbs onto his lap. There are days when this is all he wants, a warm and mostly naked Blue Sargent straddling him, and he’s glad he gets to enjoy those days now. She sighs and rests her arms over his shoulders, her eyes serious above her smirk. “So. Casper. You’re eager to indulge me.”

“Very,” Noah replies. He pushes some of her hair back. “I’ll do anything for you. At least once, before I commit to doing it all the time.”

She smiles again and kisses his forehead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please feel free to speculate on what they're talking about. I may or may not prove some of you right at some point in the future.


	9. would you have ever been with me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ronan holds up a length of chain that was in a bin next to bags of zip-ties, and he rattles it at Adam to get his attention. “I’m pretty sure this is a one-stop shop for serial killers.”
> 
> “You’re not wrong,” Adam replies. “Doomsday preppers, too.” He puts down the pack of wrenches he’d been looking at and reaches for a flathead screwdriver that’s almost two feet long. His shirt is big, like all of his shirts are, but this one is sleeveless, not unlike some of Ronan’s; when he moves, Ronan can see his ribs, the sharp curve of his collarbone where it meets his shoulder.
> 
> “The fuck is that even for?” Ronan asks. His mouth is dry and he has to settle for cracking his knuckles in lieu of breaking something.
> 
> Adam tests the weight of it. “When you really need to screw something, probably.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> August 2015.

The first week of August brings with it two things: the county fair and Blue’s birthday. Last year, the only one of their group that had been around to go was Adam, because he’d moved into his apartment near the college months earlier than had been strictly necessary, and he’d been disinterested in going. There were summer courses keeping him busy and a job he was still settling into, and, if he was being perfectly honest, the county fair seemed like it would be a little too much like home for comfort. Gansey insisted they go as a group this year, because they were all together and only had two and a half weeks before the semester started, and he was charmed by the quaint Americana of it all.

Ronan hates him for it. It’s hot as hell, claustrophobic with bodies, it stinks with fuel and body odor and frying oil and smoke and agriculture, and it was the sort of redneck mecca he generally tried to avoid.

“Don’t be such a curmudgeon,” Gansey hisses at him as they wait on line for everyone’s wrist bands. A few feet away, Adam and Blue are holding hands and Noah is buying fudge. Ronan can’t decide who he envies more. “It’s Jane’s birthday.”

Ronan scoffs. “Am I supposed to care?” 

Gansey gives him a look that’s very fatherly and long suffering. He’s attracting stares in his madras shorts and bright orange polo shirt. A few of the more hickish types milling about are side-eyeing him and muttering things like ‘fucking yuppie’ and ‘damn queers’, and some of the less hickish types are whispering things like ‘those _shorts_ , though’ and fake-laughing in a snotty, affected way that makes Ronan laugh when it’s directed at anyone but Gansey. If Gansey hears any of this, he seems to neither notice nor care. 

“It would be nice if you did.”

“Okay, Dad.”

The woman in the ticket booth calls for the next person before Gansey can complain about the nickname. They hand over their money and the ticket they’d been given when they pulled into the parking lot, and the woman counts out five paper bracelets on a sheet and tears them off. They’re bright blue and generic, looking a little like exceptionally long raffle tickets. 

Blue takes the sheet from Gansey when he and Ronan return and examines the numbers on the bands for a long moment before tearing the sheet apart to get at the one she wants.

“Why that one?” Adam asks her. He seems pained that she doesn’t seem to want or need any help putting it on. 

“I like the number,” she says. “38583 is a good one.”

Adam looks baffled by the statement as he takes the sheet and tears off one of the bands for himself. He passes the bracelets to Gansey, who says something about the color being appropriate, but Ronan doesn’t hear Blue’s response because he’s momentarily distracted by the way Adam’s fingers move as he pulls the band tight around his thin wrist. Noah clears his throat and waves the remaining bracelet in Ronan’s face.

—

They’re exploring a tent full of what seems to be mostly tools and other zombie-apocalypse necessities, the yellow canvas overhead is back lit brightly by the sun and casting a warm, slightly jaundiced glow over everything. Blue is trying to make Gansey seem less like a tourist as he marvels over things like eight dollar three-cup coffee makers and wall thermometers shaped like watermelons and Noah’s perusing a few aisles away from them, near what might be a medieval torture device or a specialized kind of wheelbarrow.

Ronan holds up a length of chain that was in a bin next to bags of zip-ties, and he rattles it at Adam to get his attention. “I’m pretty sure this is a one-stop shop for serial killers.”

“You’re not wrong,” Adam replies. “Doomsday preppers, too.” He puts down the pack of wrenches he’d been looking at and reaches for a flathead screwdriver that’s almost two feet long. His shirt is big, like all of his shirts are, but this one is sleeveless, not unlike some of Ronan’s; when he moves, Ronan can see his ribs, the sharp curve of his collarbone where it meets his shoulder.

“The fuck is that even for?” Ronan asks. His mouth is dry and he has to settle for cracking his knuckles in lieu of breaking something.

Adam tests the weight of it. “When you really need to screw something, probably.” 

Ronan snorts and picks up fluorescent orange hoodie. “God, who would even wear this?”

“Gansey. It matches his shorts.”

“He’d stand out less if he had this on.”

Adam shakes his head and makes a circular gesture in front of his face. “Nah, he just looks like a yuppie no matter what.”

“Adam,” Gansey calls from across the tent. He’s found a rack of cowboy hats and puts one on. “Who am I?”

Whenever Adam laughs, he sounds surprised, as if mirth is a foreign concept to him. This is one of those times, and his face has to rearrange itself to accommodate it. He leaves the giant screwdriver behind and goes to Gansey with a very serious “yee-haw” that sends both himself and Gansey into a peal of laughter that attracts attention from the tent’s overseer and leaves Ronan feeling strangely excluded.

He really, really wants to break something.

—

“It smells in here,” Noah complains as they wander through the livestock barns. A cow lows at him, possibly offended, as its neighbor takes an impressive crap that makes a few nearby children shriek in disgust and amusement. Noah’s face is comically scandalized. “ _Herregud_.”

“Mon dieu,” Gansey murmurs in agreement. Adam and Blue roll their eyes the exact same way, and are clearly thinking something along the lines of ‘these rich idiots’ as they step around Gansey to walk further through the barn.

Ronan puts his hand out and one of the cows leans forward to investigate. When he pets her forehead, she huffs and shakes him off. He misses the Barns. He misses when the Barns had cows.

Noah pinches his nose closed and trails after Ronan as he continues on, while Gansey trails behind because he was distracted by a sign explaining the life of a dairy cow. At a pen near the far end of the barn, Blue leans into Adam’s side and takes a handful of his loose shirt right at his waist. He puts his arm around her shoulders.

“Watch it, you’re gonna make me flash somebody,” he warns her, without sounding particularly warning.

She laughs and tugs on his shirt again. “That’s what you get for wearing a shirt with no sides. Accidental public indecency that scandalizes no one, because your chest is flat.”

“Fascists,” he says amiably. He kisses her hair and she folds against his chest to put her other arm around him. His shirt moves as she does and he does, in fact, accidentally flash Ronan without realizing it. 

The cow lows again and collapses to the floor of her pen. He sympathizes. 

—

“I’ve seen way too many Confederate flags today,” Adam murmurs as he and Ronan hold a place on the line to the ferris wheel. He’s watching an overweight and balding man with a ponytail and a stained and sweaty ‘don’t tread on me’ t-shirt a few yards away. 

“Why?” Ronan asks. He takes a loud sip of his too-sweet lemonade. “Feel too much like home?” 

He elbows Ronan in the ribs; his elbow is pointy and it kind of hurts. “Shut up. Yeah, actually. I forget there’s hicks everywhere, even up here.”

“Why I never come to these things. Too red for my blood.”

“How enlightened of you,” Adam says, tone dry. At this is expression brightens as Blue, Gansey, and Noah all return with various snacks. Gansey’s carrying a three foot long bag of still-warm kettle-corn like a baby, Noah has a bafflingly huge cone of sugar roasted nuts, and Blue has a churro of some kind in one hand and a strawberry cream crepe in the other. She hands the churro to Adam.

“You said you wanted the caramel–sorry, _cahr-muhl_ one, right?”

“Yeah, that one,” he says, letting her ribbing over his accent slide with grace. “Thanks, Blue.” 

Noah covers his mouth with one hand. “Now, what exactly is that? It’s, like, super phallic and delicious looking.” For some reason, he's watching Ronan very closely.

“You’re not wrong.” Adam attempts to raise an eyebrow at it and instead looks surprised, and everyone laughs. 

The operator for the ride calls them all up next and files them into two separate cars, Adam and Blue in their own and Ronan with Gansey and Noah. The progress to the top is slow as the ferris wheel’s cars are emptied and filled with new riders, and the higher up they go the more the sounds of the fair fall away. Under the sound of the motor powering the mechanism and the slight creak of the hinge attacking their car to one of the spokes, they can hear Adam and Blue murmuring to each other in the car above them.

“Well, this is awkward,” Noah says. He gives Gansey a sympathetic look. “Sorry, man.”

Gansey, who is generally only to be counted on to miss the meanings behind such vague statements sighs heavily. “I’m sorry, too.”

“What?” Ronan asks. They both shush him and Gansey points to the ceiling. 

“They’ll hear you,” he says. “Adam and Blue.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

Gansey and Noah exchange a look. Noah says, “Gansey likes Blue.”

“Um, so?” Ronan asks. “I’ve noticed. You’re not subtle, Gans.” 

Gansey flushes a little and, to his credit, looks otherwise unembarrassed. “Noah likes her, too.”

That is surprising. Noah likes everyone, and it’s true that he does seem especially fond of Blue, it always struck Ronan as more brotherly than Ganseylike. As he tries to reconcile this Blue laughs, high and loud, in the car above them. 

“What are you doing?” she shrieks. Whatever Adam says in response is lost in the sound of the motor running again as the wheel starts to move again. The three of them look up, as if waiting to hear something else, but the thrum of the motor drowns anything else out. 

Ronan snatches Noah’s bag of nuts out of his hand and pours some of them directly into his mouth. Noah snatches it back and loses about a dozen more of them on the floor of the car as it stops again and sways with the motion. Gansey clutches the side of the car like a lifeline.

“It’s not whiskey, man,” he says, sounding about as miffed as he ever does when Ronan harasses him. “I hope you choke.”

“I’ll haunt you,” Ronan says.

“Don’t take your death wish out on my nuts,” Noah hisses. Above them, Adam and Blue both laugh, apparently hearing the commotion in the other car. 

“I’m kinkshaming!” Blue shouts. Adam’s laughter makes the hair on Ronan’s arms stand on end.

—

On the drive back into town from the fairgrounds, Adam falls asleep in the seat behind Ronan’s. Blue leans against his shoulder and has her eyes closed, but she’s still contributing to the hushed conversation she’s having with Gansey about the horticulture and beekeeping exhibits they saw before they left. In his pocket, Ronan’s phone vibrates, and when he doesn’t acknowledge it, Noah clears his throat until Ronan sighs and pulls it out.

_I know your secret._


	10. please take me by the hand, it's so cold out tonight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You’re so cold,” Blue says. She takes his hands and holds his fingertips between her palms, blowing warm air against them. 
> 
> “That’s the warmest they’ll get.” Noah sighs, put upon. He can see his breath in the air. “Bad circulation.”
> 
> She has snowflakes in her hair and on her eyelashes and he wishes he could take a picture of her. “Is that from being dead or just because your body doesn’t body right?”
> 
> “Both? Neither? I don’t know.”
> 
> She laughs, then he laughs, and she releases his hands. He feels bereft.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fall semester, November 2015.

Kissing Blue is fucking awesome. It makes him think about driving his car with the top down and “Teenage Dirtbag” playing as loud as the speakers could handle while flying down the rural, desolate straightaways near his grandparents’ house that have the beach on one side and rock faces on the other. It’s like getting drunk on his mother’s peach schnapps and jumping on the table at the annual family reunion and making Adele laugh until she cried. It’s like the day he left the hospital after he was deemed functional again after his death.

Well, his existential-metaphorical death, not his actual end-of-existence death. Or maybe it’s the other way around. He can never remember what actually happened when he died, only that he did. Or thought he did. Or believed he did, whatever the difference is.

But yeah, anyway? Kissing Blue is fucking _awesome_.

Except for that bit where she’s still dating Adam, insofar as they’re still dating each other, since all they do at this point is argue and have sex and go days without being able to be in the same room as each other without one or the other happening. But she’s still his girlfriend and she’s not Noah’s girlfriend and she’s here, kissing Noah, in front of the glass pyramid of the student union, in the dark and in the snow. She’s so warm. 

“You’re so cold,” Blue says. She takes his hands and holds his fingertips between her palms, blowing warm air against them. 

“That’s the warmest they’ll get.” Noah sighs, put upon. He can see his breath in the air. “Bad circulation.”

She has snowflakes in her hair and on her eyelashes and he wishes he could take a picture of her. “Is that from being dead or just because your body doesn’t body right?”

“Both? Neither? I don’t know.”

She laughs, then he laughs, and she releases his hands. He feels bereft. She tugs on his sleeve. “Come on, I’ll make you cocoa at work.”

He follows her, letting her lead him by his jacket’s sleeve, because he knows he’ll follow her anywhere if she’ll have him come along. Her hair is going a little limp under the moisture of the snow. It probably doesn’t look good for him to be kissing a student on campus, but it’s not like she’s one of his students. Just a student, in a completely different major, who only took one of the more palatable, obscure philosophy GEs to fulfill a requirement for her degree, and he hadn’t even taught that one.

“What was it that you took,” he asks her as they trudge through the powder, “The philosophy course? I don’t remember anymore.”

She makes her mouth very small and moves it side to side as she thinks. “Um. Environmental ethics. Oh, did I tell you I’m thinking I’ll sign up for Love and Sex next semester? It seems interesting, Cialina liked it.”

“It’s a cool class,” he agrees. "It’ll go nice with your minor.”

“That’s what Adam said.” She sounds kind of tired, and Noah doesn’t blame her. Adam has been more difficult to be around than usual lately, and he’s inadvertently taken some of whatever he’s going through out on the rest of them a few times. Noah, speaking from experience, suggested Adam take a few days off to try and get his head on straight again, and Adam, in no uncertain terms, told him to go fuck himself.

Adam when he isn’t Adaming right is a terrible thing indeed.

Noah stops walking, and Blue stops with him, a few steps ahead. He retracts his sleeve from her grip and buries his hands in his pockets. His shoulder is wet when he rubs his face against it. “He’s my friend, Blue.”

In the cold blue twilight, he can’t tell if her eyes just seem bright because they’re reflecting the street lights or if she’s glassy-eyed. In a soft voice, with the same tone one uses when they’re reciting their address, she says, “I don’t love him.” Her breath is a small cloud in front of her face, and her eyes don’t look shiny anymore. “I don’t think I ever did. Not that way. I tried to, and I think I believed I did for a long time. But he doesn’t make it easy. It’s been almost two years and, honestly, it’s too hard to keep acting like there’s anything more than just sex and habit keeping us together.”

Finding the right words to say takes a lot of effort, but Blue’s very patient even as she starts to shiver a little. “He does love you. So much.”

“I know.” She sniffles, but not in a way that’s emotional. “But I don’t like being afraid of him. Or being afraid of upsetting him when he’s in a bad way.” She steps closer and leans her head against Noah’s chest. “He’s always in a bad way lately. The other day we started arguing about something and he lashed out. Not at me, at something in his studio. It was like he had no idea he did it. He’s never done that before.”

Noah knew about that. He’d dropped by to see if they wanted to get lunch with him that day and found only Adam, ashamed and redirecting the remaining anger at some part of himself in a removed kind of way. He stared at the broken moving dolly like he wasn’t really seeing it. That disquieted, fuming Adam was a dangerous Adam, and he was terribly vulnerable to his own fury. Noah sat down beside him and waited patiently until, after about ten minutes, Adam put his hands over the back of his neck and drew his knees to his chest with a sound that was about as close to a sob as Noah had ever heard him make. 

He’d looked very young and Noah felt very old and very useless. Like a ghost, unable to be comforting, with no body and cold hands.

Noah and Adam aren’t as close as they respectively are to Gansey and Ronan and Blue, and Noah has never been privy to Adam being demonstrative of his feelings. Being the person to witness him fracturing like that was not a burden Noah felt qualified to bear. 

“I think,” Noah says carefully, “Adam is trying very hard all the time, and we just never noticed before.”

Blue nods against him and her hair is going to be static-y from his wool coat. Noah puts an arm around her shoulders. The broken half of his face is numb from the cold. “I feel horrible for wanting to leave him when he’s trying so hard. But it’ll be worse if I don’t, I think.”

He makes a thoughtful sound and puts his other arm around her, hugging her to his chest. Her hands are balled up against his ribs. “He’s going to be heartbroken.”

“I know.” She sniffles again, with feeling this time, and loops her arms around his waist. “But I think he’s always been that way.”


	11. while i'm away i'll write home every day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He sets his mug down to scratch Fox roughly about the ears the way he likes it. “Fox misses him. Don’t you? You miss Ronan?” Fox’s ears go back and his tail wags so hard it makes him stumble. He whines and looks at the door like he’s expecting Ronan to walk in at any minute. 
> 
> “Just Fox, I’m sure,” Noah muses. 
> 
> “It’s definitely just Fox.” Fox waves his paw at Adam for more attention the moment he looks away. 
> 
> “You just miss getting laid, you fiend.”
> 
> Adam laughs. “Yeah, that’s all I miss.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fall semester, November 2019.
> 
> Spoilers for the future of _Color in Your Hands_ , obviously, since this takes place three-ish years later.

Adam wakes up with a mouthful of red-blond hair, a tingling arm, and a crick in his neck. 

_Oh no._

The hair moves and some of the feeling starts to come back to his hand. He flexes his fingers, grimacing through the pins and needles as he tries to figure out how to get out of this without disturbing his companion, and something licks his fingers. Even numb, the sensation is unmistakable.

“Ugh.” The hair whines at him and turns and licks his chin. Adam wrinkles his nose and turns away from the attention and gets a very wet nose pressing into his Adam’s apple. He clearly made himself quite cozy overnight. “Fox, come on. Lemme up.” 

Fox does not move and rolls onto his belly, cutting off the blood in Adam’s arm again. Adam rubs Fox’s belly and says, with more sternness than he feels, “You’re lucky you’re cute.” Fox’s tail wags and his tongue lolls out, breathing dog breath on Adam’s face. “You’re gross. Get up.”

The dog blinks his single amber eye and rolls onto his side before standing up, leaning over to nose at Adam’s face again as he stretches and gets up. He twists as Adam goes into the bathroom to brush his teeth and wash his face, and eventually follows after to sit in the doorway and watch. Adam watches him back.

This wasn’t supposed to be permanent, but now the idea of waking up and being alone again in his apartment is hopelessly depressing. He’s even getting used to waking up spooning Fox, who doesn’t seem to understand the “stay at the foot of the bed rule”. 

He really is lucky he’s cute. 

Fox mostly watches Adam go about the rest of his morning, with a kind of patience Adam hadn’t anticipated when he agreed to foster him. He seems perfectly content to wait until Adam’s ready to take him out most mornings, so long as Adam pets him every time he walks past and so long as he gets his breakfast on time. 

“Spoiled,” Adam tells him, like he does every morning. The dog eats better than he does, but he’s loathe to admit that he prefers it that way; he didn’t bring this thing into his house to not treat it properly. Fox, for his part, never contests being called spoiled and seems to revel in it. He dances a little as Adam fills his bowls and wraps his medicine in a piece of cold-cut turkey.

Across the room, Skype chimes at him. Adam sets the bowls on the floor and steps over Fox to answer the call. 

“So I was on the bus today,” Noah says, without preamble. “And this dude in a suit sits next to me with a legal pad that just had the word ‘muppets’ written on it.”

“You saw that on Tumblr,” Adam says. “You need new material.”

Noah huffs and takes an indignant drag from his cigarette. It might be a cigarette. It might also be a joint. Adam can’t quite tell with Noah anymore. “I don’t have the time to be genuinely clever anymore. Being an assistant professor sucks, man. It’s like having a job.”

Adam wanders back into his kitchen to get his coffee mug, patting Fox as he goes. “It is a job. You’ve been there for almost three years.”

“Don’t remind me.” Noah takes another drag and peers into the camera like he can see into Adam’s apartment better. “Every day gets me closer to my tenure. Where’s Fox?”

“Eating,” Adam tells him when he comes back. “It’s raining and he hates getting his feet wet, so we’re waiting for it to stop to go for a _w-a-l-k_ in the _p-a-r-k_.”

“Same, if by all that you mean enjoying my day off doing fuck all.” It’s definitely a joint, then. 

“Have you heard from everyone?” Adam goes to his email in another window, deleting notifications from job hunting websites trying to get him to become a CDL driver despite his chosen parameters, and apartment listings that are no longer relevant. There’s even a good, old-fashioned porn bot hiding in his spam folder, highly suspect and definitely carrying something unsavory. It spelled his name wrong (Ada Paraishe sounds like a nice girl, though) and seems to think he’s interested in frisky “big-titted” co-eds, because, obviously, he is, possessing both a dick and a college degree. It gets deleted. Another, from an adult site he does subscribe to, gets filed away for later perusal. 

“They’re good, enjoying the open road and Gansey’s semester off.” Noah is reading something else on his screen, his tone slightly absent. “Henry said they might head out this way if we can make the time to see them next month. I told him I’d talk to you about it.”

“Far be it from me to get in your way. They’re all, like, yours.” 

“They miss you, too, and it’s not that far out of the way when they’re driving aimlessly across the country like this. He said they’d bring Ronan.”

Adam makes a sound that’s equally laugh and groan. Fox trots over to see what’s wrong, jumping up on his hind legs to whine at Adam’s neck. 

Dismayed, Noah asks, “Did you fight?”

“No, no, we didn’t fight. He’s coming in a few weeks, before they all make it out here, and spending the month.” He sets his mug down to scratch Fox roughly about the ears the way he likes it. “Fox misses him. Don’t you? You miss Ronan?” Fox’s ears go back and his tail wags so hard it makes him stumble. He whines and looks at the door like he’s expecting Ronan to walk in at any minute. 

“Just Fox, I’m sure,” Noah muses. 

“It’s definitely just Fox.” Fox waves his paw at Adam for more attention the moment he looks away. 

“You just miss getting laid, you fiend.”

Adam laughs. “Yeah, that’s all I miss.”

Ronan got a hotel room for that exact reason, at least for the first few days. He was strangely prudish about being despoiled in the dog’s presence. It’s like he’s forgotten that Adam’s apartment is nearly twice the size of the one he’d had in New York, with enough doors to keep Fox out of the bedroom for an hour or two. Or more. Probably more. It’s been three months.

“Your hands are probably all calloused again,” Noah says. His grin is salacious. “He’s gonna love it.”

“If you think I’ve been jerking off to the point of having callouses, you’re more stoned than I thought.”

Noah looks at his joint, considering it for a long, long moment, before shrugging and bringing it to his mouth again. “Whatever. I don’t have anywhere to be today. Tell me I’m wrong, though. I know I’m not.”

Adam raises his eyebrows. “You sure about that?”

“Is that an invitation to investigate my claim?”

“Six hours isn’t that far.”

“It’s an hour by plane and if you keep joking like that and I’m gonna get the wrong idea,” Noah says.

“Joking or not, you already have the wrong idea,” Adam retorts. Fox rests his head on Adam’s thigh and huffs, his one eye meeting Adam’s and glancing at the window meaningfully. Adam leans over to lift the shade. “I’ve gotta go, sun’s finally out and Fox is probably dying.”

Noah waves the joint at the webcam. “Go, enjoy your outing and your vitamin D. I’m trying to not look stupid at the next faculty meeting, I’ll be here all day.” He doesn’t wait for Adam to disconnect and ends the call.

Adam pulls shorts on over his boxers and rummages around for a clean pair of socks while Fox’s patience starts to run out in the next room. He even starts whining and dancing near the door, guilting Adam into nearly forgetting his keys. As he gets Fox into his harness for the day, he apologizes (”I know, buddy, I know, I’m hurrying”), his phone buzzes. 

_hey loser_

Adam smiles, responds, and tucks it into his pocket as he ushers Fox outside.

_Hey yourself, Lynch._


	12. when i fall, i will fall to you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This feels _very_ dangerous.
> 
> They haven’t kissed since that first time, two weeks ago. Blue thinks they should be proud of their restraint, considering how much time she’s started spending here in his office with him, how many fraught moments they’ve had where they’ve nearly kissed and stopped, how many lingering looks they’ve shared since. She wonders if theirs are as obvious as the ones Ronan sends Adam, that Adam doesn’t realize he sends back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fall semester, December 2015
> 
> _Content warning for references to Noah's extensive facial injuries and reconstruction. It's vague and brief, but potentially upsetting; skip the two paragraphs between "I'd ask you out" and "nothing was fair" if you want to avoid the details._

Blue should probably feel badly for this, but she doesn’t. Visiting Noah’s office, outside of his office hours, for the sole purpose of making out with him where they won’t get caught. Tad the Intern is in classes or who knows where, Noah’s students believe he’s not available, none of their friends know where to come looking for them, would never expect them to be alone together anyplace on campus.

Adam has no idea. She’s equal parts uncaring and concerned what will happen when he finds out, if he ever does.

“Give him some credit,” Noah says, as if reading her thoughts. He looks up at her over his reading glasses and a paper on intersubjective verifiability in phenomenology. “He’s probably known for weeks and is either in denial or pretending not to notice.”

“How did you know I was thinking about Adam?” she asks him, setting aside a paper she’d been pretending to read and couldn’t understand.

He shrugs, with an integrity he always has, “You make a certain face when you’re thinking about him lately. You pout, like this,” he purses his lips into a moue to demonstrate. Then he smiles at her, crookedly. “It would be real cute if I didn’t know why you did it.”

“Pshaw,” she says, twisting to face him better from her perch on the opposite side of his desk. “I feel like I should feel bad, but I don’t. Am I a terrible person? A--a, what’s the word?”

“Harlot?” he offers, without disgust or animosity.

It’s not the word she was looking for, but ultimately they all mean the same thing, these ugly words for women who have sex, with or without infidelity. “Yeah, sure, whatever. Am I a harlot?”

“No. I don’t think you are. And honestly? I don’t think Adam would think you are, either.”

“No?”

Noah shakes his head. “I think he’d be more bothered that you didn’t say anything before this became, like, a thing.”

Relief ripples through her. So this is a thing, not her hanging around and imagining they were on the same page, like so many other girls who follow their preferred staff members around, hopeful ingénues, like ducklings. 

He sets the paper he was reading aside in a folder and pushes his glasses onto his forehead. He looks older without them on, and also more crooked without the line of them across his face to distract from the asymmetry of his features. His eyes are leather brown and she can see the nearly black roots of his natural hair color coming in along his hairline. She leans over to poke at the stripe of darkness above his forehead. He goes cross-eyed watching her do it and it makes her laugh.

“You need a touch up,” she tells him.

Noah scratches where she’d poked him. “Gansey’s gonna be in DC and Ronan’s seeing his mom this weekend, if you wanna come help me.”

She takes his glasses away and his hair falls back into place. She pushes it aside, just a little, covering more of the ugly scar from his left temple to the hinge of his jaw he’s self-conscious about. “That seems dangerous.”

“All the best things are.” He takes one of her hands in his own. “Come here?”

She sets his glasses on his computer stand and carefully swivels over the top of his desk to go from one side to the other. They sit like that for a while, holding hands with her sitting on his desk and him sitting between her knees. His thumb is making little circles on the back of her hand.

Noah doesn’t lean in and doesn’t cross the boundary they’ve silently agreed upon, but he releases her hand to drag one cold finger tip very lightly down her arm from her elbow to the tip of her middle finger. 

“I’d ask you out, if you weren’t Adam’s girlfriend,” he whispers. He traces the path of her veins again. She shivers this time.

Blue cups his cheek with her free hand. Noah looks up, conflicted and earnest, as he leans against her palm. The skin on the left side of his face is slightly off, so much of it scar tissue and skin grafts. The muscle and bone beneath it more decidedly off where it can’t move as easily as it should from the bone grafts, pins and surgical screws, the metal plate where his cheekbone and part of his jaw used to be. 

Noah told Gansey once, with bleak humor, that he is very lucky to have rich parents and good lawyers who made sure he got to keep most of his face after what Whelk did to it, but even rich parents and good lawyers could only accomplish so much. There’s still a lot of damage no one but Noah has to live with.

Nothing was fair.

“I’d say okay.”

He exhales hard and kisses her palm. His lips are cold, too, like his fingers. 

She tells him, “You should get a space heater.”

“I’ll get a space heater,” Noah murmurs against her hand. He covers it with one of his own, his fingertips light on the bone of her wrist. 

This feels _very_ dangerous.

They haven’t kissed since that first time, two weeks ago. Blue thinks they should be proud of their restraint, considering how much time she’s started spending here in his office with him, how many fraught moments they’ve had where they’ve nearly kissed and stopped, how many lingering looks they’ve shared since. She wonders if theirs are as obvious as the ones Ronan sends Adam, that Adam doesn’t realize he sends back. 

She’s aware of her expression changing and stops herself. Noah smirks. 

“Now you’ve made me all self-conscious about it,” she chides half-heartedly. She puts her hands on his shoulders and shakes him once, very gently. “Do you know what you’ve done?”

“You just told me,” he says, still grinning. 

“Silly me.” She’s momentarily preoccupied by the laundered-too-many-times softness of his sweatshirt. She tugs lightly at his hood. Noah hums agreeably as he leans forward, scooting his chair closer to her to put his hands on her legs. Then he thinks better of it and places them on the desk beside her instead, and then changes his mind again and returns them to her hips. 

They lean in at the same time. 

It lasts a few seconds, then a few more, and then a minute, slow and unhurried. Two weeks ago they didn’t take the time to figure out the finer points of kissing each other properly; her lips are full and his are thin--she keeps feeling the edge of his teeth and doesn’t think it’s intentional, but she likes it anyway--and his mouth and nose are just crooked enough to present a challenge to making their mouths fit together just right. Noah’s lips are soft and taste like cherry chapstick, a sweet coffee drink, and cigarettes. 

When they pull apart, Blue rests her forehead against his and she watches him lick his lip, his eyes still closed. He’d done that last time, the first time, too; she wonders if it’s something he always does. It’s cute, like he’s trying to savor the taste or feeling of her. They breathe together and eventually Blue’s eyes drift shut again. 

“I…” Noah starts. She hears him swallow. “I wanna fuck you. Sorry.”

Blue rubs her thumbs over the corners of his jaw. “Don’t be. I wanna fuck you, too.”

It is, she realizes, so nice to have Noah look her in the eye. Adam can’t. The one time they tried, just like this, it lasted a handful of seconds before he’d reflexively started to cry, which embarrassed him so badly he couldn’t be persuaded to trying again with more distance between them. 

“You’re doing it again,” Noah says. 

“I am not.”

He leans back enough to look at her and taps her still pouting bottom lip. “I’m dead, _niebieski_ , not stupid. You definitely were.”

She wrinkles her nose. “Please don’t tell me you’re gonna re-christen me, too.”

“ _Niebieski_ ,” Noah says, “Is ‘blue’ in Polish. I thought you’d like it since, like, it’s not something insipid like ‘babe’ or ‘honey’.”

“A pet name?” He smiles and ducks his head a little, shyly. Her heart and stomach flutter, trilling with how affected she is by that bashful smile. She bites her lip to keep herself from smiling and tilts his chin up. “Should I expect one in each of the languages you know?”

He shrugs. “Maybe. I don’t know. That’s a lot, I know a couple.”

“Well.” Blue takes one of his hands in her own and holds it to her chest. “I guess I’ll have to come up with a bunch for you, too, huh?”

“Then I say okay,” Noah replies. It’s only fair.


	13. let me prove you'll unlock just for me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They don’t talk, after. They probably should, or need to, or are supposed to, but they don’t. Adam simply said, as they left the courthouse, “I don’t want to talk,” and Ronan replied, “The fuck would I talk about?” and that was that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one's a doozy, kids. I've updated the tags, but please feel free to request additional ones if need be.

_June 2014_

They don’t talk, after. They probably should, or need to, or are supposed to, but they don’t. Adam simply said, as they left the courthouse, “I don’t want to talk,” and Ronan replied, “The fuck would I talk about?” and that was that.  


The little room above the office is tiny and has a splintering wood floor and a slanted ceiling too low, even at its highest point, for either of them to stand up fully. It is pitiful and bleak and exactly what Adam remembers, down to the water stains and the foggy moisture between the window panes, from the month he lived here, just over a year ago, before everything was finalized in New York. He can tell that Ronan wants to punch holes in the thin plaster walls.

Adam sags onto the cot with a kind of absent familiarity, muscle memory, and stares at the narrow, angled bathroom door. Ronan’s clenching and unclenching his hands, admirably leashing his anger over the verdict, purely for Adam’s benefit. Adam inhales shakily, then exhales hard, and wretches his tie loose in a sudden fit of anger. 

He should be happy. He’d only wanted someone to tell him what happened to him was real, and that was what he got.

The fury consumes him so immediately, so completely, he doesn’t have the chance to catch it and strangle it into submission, to break it down into its mechanics and throw each component away until there’s nothing left. It burns and burns and burns and it hurts where it sits in his chest and scorches his bones and he can barely breathe. He wants to scream or break glass or destroy something with his bare hands.

A pathetic voice inside of him reminds him his mother hadn’t bothered to come, that his father hadn’t even deigned to wear a suit he’d been so sure no one would believe Adam’s side of things. 

_You rotten fucking liar–_

He should be grateful he even got as much validation as he did today. 

He doesn’t deserve even that much. 

_Ungrateful, entitled, selfish–_

He played his part so well. The battered son, the traumatized overachiever, the valedictorian who couldn’t go to his dream school, managed to convince a room full of people into believing he didn’t deserve–

_Manipulative bastard–_

Hands close around his wrists. 

Dumb animal panic sluices through the anger like ice water. 

He can’t move his arms. He can’t protect his head again. He’s going to lose the hearing in his other ear, too

“Adam.”

_Just because you throw yourself on the ground, Adam, doesn’t mean we’re done talking–_

His wrists are released but now there’s pressure around his chest, his back, he can’t move his arms. A body. A person, holding him. He pushes back, trying to get away or get them away and accomplishes nothing because he’s weak

Someone’s pleading to be released. _Coward._

“Adam,” Ronan’s voice says again. “Stop.” It’s very close to Adam’s ear, but not loud, and it silences the phantom of Robert Parrish. 

Adam sags, contained in Ronan’s arms, all the fight leaving him as suddenly as it came on. He realizes his scalp hurts, that the back of one of his hands stings; it’s damp and a sticky and getting blood on Ronan’s clothes. The fingertips of his other hand are hot and tacky, too, from gouging himself. He hadn’t even realized he was doing it, that he’d been pulling his hair. He wonders if he said any of what he’d been thinking out loud.

He feels so ruined, now that it’s over and he’s left with the sinking truth that he can never go home again, that his mother will never speak to him again, that his father must hate him now more than ever. The realness, the permanence, the doneness of it all.

“Oh, god.” He sobs, just once, against Ronan’s shoulder. “ _God._ ”

Ronan’s fingers are in his hair, stroking it gently the way Blue does, the way his mother–

“Don’t–”

“Someday,” Ronan tells him, his fingers are still in Adam’s hair and they’re so gentle another sob rises up in Adam’s throat, “You’ll look back on today and be happy.”

Adam latches onto the idea of it to keep himself from drowning again, latches onto Ronan with his bloody hands, and tries to ignore the way his chest heaves.

He hadn’t told anyone about his father, not in so many words, but he didn’t deny or correct the assumptions they made. It had felt much safer for the secretive creature of Adam Parrish to keep this horror and shame to himself. To do what his mother always said about keeping it in the family, that no one else really needed to know.

His mother–

There’s pressure building in Adam’s forehead aching in tandem with the burn of his tears in his eyes. Ronan understands, he realizes, more than Adam thought anyone could; hasn’t he been exiled from his home, too? Didn’t he get torn away from what he knew? He has no parents to talk to, either. He feels so ashamed, but so understood the embarrassment doesn’t wound him further. 

He doesn’t know how Ronan found out about the trial, or how he knew where to find Adam when Adam had so carefully made himself unavailable for the three days he’d be in Henrietta again. But he’s so, so happy he didn’t have to sit through the hearing unsupported, that even though it had been awful to disclose everything that had happened to a room full of strangers, it was easier with Ronan there. There was one person in the courtroom who was there for him, when the two people who should have been there hadn’t taken it seriously or hadn’t bothered to come at all 

He doesn’t know what he would’ve been doing now if Ronan hadn’t come or hadn’t been able to find him. He doesn’t want to think about it. The blood and skin under his nails and the aching side of his head is ominous enough without Ronan’s intervention. 

Adam feels like a tantruming child, raging and panicking and self-injuring and crying even though he got his way, a spoiled brat who can’t be satisfied and won’t accept the final word of an adult. 

_All alone all alone all alone_

Ronan came, made the ten hour drive to be there, to make sure Adam wasn’t. He doesn’t say thank you. He doesn’t tell Ronan how much it means to him that he came. 

His head rests miserably on Ronan’s shoulder, throbbing forehead to pulse, every inch of him shaking, upright only because Ronan’s keeping him that way, and hugs him back. Then he starts to cry again, silent and exhausted, and Ronan doesn’t move an inch.


	14. make out and then talk and then make out some more

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’ve just been wondering what it is we’re doing,” Noah says, when they finally manage to stop. “I know I like you a whole lot.”
> 
> Blue’s insides go mushy. “I like you a whole lot, too.” 
> 
> Noah smiles, even though he’s clearly trying not to. “I’m a grown-ass man, I shouldn’t get all twisted up over a girl like this anymore. I’m regressing and it’s all your fault.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Winter break, December 2015. Takes place after "when i fall, i will fall to you."

“I’m drunk.”

“Are you?”

“I only get silly like this when I’m drunk.”

“I jump on tables when I’m drunk.”

Blue gasps. “No!”

Noah nods gravely. The effect is only slightly diminished by the fact that he’s upside down on the couch beside her. “I polished off a bottle of my mom’s fancy schnapps right before my cousin Gayle’s bat mitzvah and jumped on one of the tables to tell her how boring I thought her party was, but I don’t remember anything between thinking ‘that folding table can definitely hold my weight!’ and waking up in the ER.” She has to put her chopsticks down to avoid choking on her food as he regales her with another story, also involving underage drinking and climbing on tables, that ended in being uninvited to Gayle’s sweet sixteen while the party was in progress around him. “So really it made perfect sense she didn’t invite me to her wedding, either.”

Blue wails and buries her face in her arms, her mostly empty glass carefully taken from her and moved before she knocks it over.

When Noah told her he’d have Monmouth to himself this weekend, Blue made a convincing excuse to switch shifts with Cialina to make herself available. Between his teaching schedule and her classes and job, they don’t get many chances to be alone, and so far they’ve spent eighteen hours making each other laugh until they cry, making out, getting pleasantly stoned, and eating takeout from every place in town they can get delivery from. It’s perfect and easy and they’re pointedly not dwelling on the fact that, at any moment, the illusion could be shattered if Ronan gets sick of Declan and comes home before Sunday.

“I don’t want to just be friends with benefits,” Noah says, unprompted, after several minutes where they’re both content to eat in silence. It takes a moment for Blue’s understanding to catch up with her ears, and when it does she looks up from her pan see awe. “I do want something more, though, I just can’t figure out what.” Noah looks at her, then pointedly at the carton in her hands. “You’re gonna drop that shrimp.”

Blue watches it tumble out of the perfectly constructed bite she’d managed to put together, and stabs the chopsticks into the noodles in annoyance. She sets it on the coffee table and turns to him, tilting her head to try and look at him right-side up. 

“See, you can’t just go around saying things like that without warning,” she scolds, without any real heat. “They deserve my full attention.”

“We’d be here all night,” Noah says. He gestures between them with his fork. “What with the profound deficit of attention between us.”

“We’d manage.” She picks a piece of pineapple off the top of the container of rice resting on his stomach and rests her cheek on her knee.

He laugh-groans and turns towards the ceiling, away from her, and scrunches his eyes closed. “You’re being all cute and it’s fucking me up,” he whines. Noah frowns in an overly committed way that makes Blue grin and mumbles to himself, “This is serious. I’m being serious. Serious business.” He peeks one eye open and looks at her, then turns away from her completely with whine. “Stop! How do you do that?”

Blue bites her lip to stifle her giggles and nudges him with her elbow. “I’m not doing anything!”

“You’re making that face with your face when I’m trying to be serious. It’s making my brain useless.” 

Blue reaches for his face and turns him back to her. “You’re right,” she says. “This is serious. It’s so serious, Noah, oh my god.”

“It’s so super cereal right now,” he says, eyes bright and charmed his own joke.

She laughs. “Yes, it’s that. So super cereal. Pull your shit together, Czerny.” She puts her palms on his cheeks and leans in close. She tries to keep her expression playfully serious, but it’s hard when she knows she’s about to completely set him off. “The fate of huge manatees rides on this.” 

He laughs so hard at her suddenly grim tone it makes him choke, and she takes his fried rice from him when he tries to sit up. As he rights himself, she climbs up onto the couch and for several minutes they keep falling into the trap of sobering up, making eye contact, and being set off into another fit of laughter. 

“I’ve just been wondering what it is we’re doing,” Noah says, when they finally manage to stop. “I know I like you a whole lot.”

Blue’s insides go mushy. “I like you a whole lot, too.” 

Noah smiles, even though he’s clearly trying not to. “I’m a grown-ass man, I shouldn’t get all twisted up over a girl like this anymore. I’m regressing and it’s all your fault.” 

“Pshaw.” She puts her hands on his cheeks again, pushing them together to give him a fish face. “Getting lowkey turnt and stupid is what we’re doing right now, and maybe tomorrow we’ll go out. I dunno. It depends on how the rest of tonight goes.”

“It’s going pretty great,” Noah says. 

Blue smiles. “Yeah, it is.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is from a "friends or more?" prompt list on Tumblr, and I listened to [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN0guZwMYzI) (and also [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1x1wjGKHjBI)) on repeat while I worked on this, in case anyone was curious what sort of vibes the whole weekend they spend together has.


	15. reassemble the parts, despite your narrative arc

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Noah scrubs his hands over his face and groans loudly, an indoor-volume scream. “I just--fuck, man, I don’t know. I’m not ready. To move on with my life. I didn’t even want to go on that interview, you know? I wanted Adam to talk me out of it.”
> 
> Ronan huffs a laugh, then he realizes Noah’s expression is deadly serious. “He’d never do that.”
> 
> “I know. Of course he, of all people, would tell me what I needed to hear and not of what I wanted.”

Strangely, unbelievably, things have gone back to normal. It’s weird that Adam was what Ronan needed to feel like himself again in the wake of the careful, efficient destruction he caused. 

“Remind me again why you’re here and not harassing someone else.”

“You’re easily harassed,” Ronan says. “And you can’t escape while I’m blocking your door.”

Noah doesn’t sound particularly harassed as he mumbles, cigarette in his mouth, “I feel very threatened right now.” He ashes into a water bottle full of brown water, spent matches, and cigarette butts. Ronan’s lip curls a little in distaste the longer he looks at it. 

Everything is different. It’s not ideal, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing, either.

Adam and Ronan are talking, almost as easily as they used to, but Ronan is trying to not seem too obviously wounded and Adam was withdrawn and guarded and hurting in a deeper kind of way no one can placate before he left for Henrietta. Adam hasn’t been hanging around Monmouth in his free time unless someone else other than Ronan is there. Game night and movie night continue on unimpeded by awkwardness and strain, but Ronan and Adam sit well apart anyway. Ronan hasn’t been going by Adam’s apartment without announcing intent to stop by first, and he hasn’t asked for his key back and Adam hasn’t offered it.

Everything is fine, though. Good, even. 

They’ve been talking and hanging out and spend time alone together, but it’s calculated and never where they live. It’s better this way, Ronan thinks, so they both have ample opportunity to find their footing with each other again before treading too close to any landmines that might be hidden in their fragile truce. Still, it felt like a victory when he made Adam choke on his drink during a round of Cards Against Humanity by clever combination of _Being a motherfucking sorcerer_ and _The amount of gay I am_ the night before he left for West Virginia. 

“You’re surprisingly sober today,” Noah says as he swivels side to side in his very worn leather desk chair. “Should we be worried?” 

Ronan frowns and spins in a slow, lazy circle in his chair, an armless rolling contraption that claims to be ergonomic but is instead just ugly and uncomfortable. He narrowly misses banging his knee against the corner of Noah’s desk. “Should you?”

Noah sighs. He’s been doing that a lot. He’s also been smoking more, going through packs of cigarettes and dropping what are probably appalling amounts of money on choice weed from who knows where. An oddly nurturing corner of Ronan’s mind has him wondering if, all things considered, Noah should smoke. He reaches for the pack sitting on Noah’s desk and Noah slides it closer to himself, eyes narrowed like he can sense Ronan’s latent mother-hen instinct starting to surface, then moves the pack out of Ronan’s reach entirely. Ronan scoots back again, successfully thwarted, and resumes his spinning as the smoke swirls and dissipates in the sunlight as it drifts towards the ceiling. 

The breeze coming through the tiny office’s tiny window only slightly puts a dent in the smell of the smoke, and Noah seems unbothered by it. Neither is Ronan, who feels oddly comforted by it, then promptly annoyed by that realization. There was once a time when the smell would’ve made him gag, his healthy farm boy lungs choked out by even the faintest whiff of a cigarette, but it’s probably safe to assume that, at some point since he turned sixteen, that changed. 

“You want something,” Noah says, completely derailing Ronan’s train of thought. It crashes and burns spectacularly and Ronan is glad for it, but he glares anyway. Silence is never wrong, and he’s good at it. Noah is unfazed, immune due to some kind of elder brother superpowers and long exposure to Ronan’s silences, and stares back. After nearly thirty seconds Noah sighs again and picks up a thick paperback book with Heidegger in bold green font on the cover. Just looking at it makes Ronan want to yawn, so he does, which earns him a very unimpressed look over the top of both the book and Noah’s reading glasses.

Ronan doesn’t think he actually wants anything from Noah, but now he feels like he might and just hasn’t realized it yet. Noah’s uncanny that way; he knows he can’t force Ronan to say anything, but he understands that if he opens the door, Ronan might decide to feel inclined to speak when he might not have otherwise.

The angle of the daylight coming in from outside has changed slightly, but it can’t have been longer than ten minutes and a dozen pages turned at most before Noah breaks the silence first, without looking up from his reading. “You want to ask me something.” 

Ronan asks, “Isn’t there a smoke detector in here?”

“It was a literal closet, so no.” To demonstrate how ridiculous his office is, Noah sets his book aside and sits up straight, cigarette hanging out of his mouth, and holds his arms straight out so his fingertips touch both walls at once. He slouches and sits back again, having sufficiently demonstrated his point. His eyes narrow, considering and thoughtful and a little unintentionally intense, and he makes a finger gun at Ronan with his cigarette-free hand. “You want to ask me something about Adam.”

“You ever get bored of being a know-it-all?” Ronan asks, snottily.

Brightly, Noah replies, “Only when you get bored of being a dickass. What’s up?”

Ronan watches him slosh the cigarette bottle like a metronome. “You think he’s okay?”

“In general?” Noah makes a face. “No. Not even a little bit, ever, in his entire life. Considering the circumstances?” He pauses, considering. “Yeah, actually, I do.”

“Really.” Ronan absolutely, in no conceivable universe or reality, would be okay with his parents dying.

Noah waves his hand through a curl of smoke. “He’s finally getting closure. Leaving things the way he did might’ve felt final, but it wasn’t. Not really. There was always gonna be a chance they’d just, like, pop back into his life somehow and fuck him up all over again, right? Now they can’t. Once everything’s all taken care of and he comes back, it’s really, totally done.”

Noah’s right, of course, but Ronan feels himself frowning all the same. He schools his expression back to his typical scowl. “I don’t get it.”

“You wouldn’t,” Noah says, “But that’s okay, too.”

Niall Lynch has been dead for the better part of a decade and Ronan still doesn’t have any closure and no sense that it’ll ever come. The grief counselor and court-ordered therapists all said that violent suicides have a way of impacting those left behind that way, especially whoever’s unfortunate enough to find the body. Niall’s death will always be a gaping wound to Ronan and the very notion of even getting closure is alien to him, the lack of violent and prolonged mourning equally so, but Ronan loved his father more than he’s ever loved anyone else. 

He doesn’t actually know how Adam feels about his parents. They don’t talk about it. It’s not a point of tension so much as they’ve accepted that Adam cannot comprehend why Niall’s death and Aurora’s long unwellness affected Ronan and his brothers so, and that while Ronan can understand objectively why Adam may not love his parents, he doesn’t understand how it works in practice. Ronan knows that Adam shamefully missed them, once, or at least the house or the town he’d grown up in. He knows Adam hasn’t been back in West Virginia at all since the day he met his father in court two years ago, and hadn’t even been as close since he went to the Barns with Ronan over spring break. He knows Adam didn’t want to go at all, and only is because there’s no one at home to make him wish he hadn’t. 

They lapse into silence again, but this time it feels weighted and elastic with their thoughts instead of pleasantly vacant. After a few minutes Noah stops tipping it to instead tap the cap against his chest as he speaks, haltingly, to the ceiling. “My parents… I don’t think they really get me, you know?”

Ronan snorts, as if to say _no shit, of course they don’t._ Margot and David Czerny worry constantly, incomprehensibly, about everything and agonize, understandably, about Noah. Noah, their eldest child. Noah, their only son. Noah, who literally almost died. Noah, who moved across the country to put three thousand miles and ten months of the year between himself and their agonizing. Sometimes, when he talks about his family, it’s hard for Ronan to believe that Noah is twenty-eight, because Margot and David don’t seem aware that he is. Hell, sometimes, Noah himself seems to forget he’s almost thirty. 

Somehow reading Ronan’s thoughts, Noah’s expression sours. “First of all, rude. Second, has anyone asked _you_ recently why you’re not married and making babies yet? Because my parents are starting to think there’s something wrong with me.”

Ronan is about to retort that, no, of course not, when he realizes he’d be proving Noah’s point. “There’s a lot of somethings wrong with you.”

Noah smiles, sarcastic and unamused, and flips him off. He doesn’t correct Ronan or deny that Ronan is right, though, because there’s no point in being coy about the fact that Noah is, by all accounts, a complete and utter wreck of a person masquerading as someone capable and whole and not nearly crippled by pain, trauma, and anxiety multiple times a day. 

“So they’re getting all pushy about stuff,” Ronan says. “Big fucking deal, all parents do that. My mom was catatonic for three years and she still found ways to guilt me.”

“Well, yeah, but it’s not the same.” 

“I’m pretty sure Catholic guilt and Jewish guilt aren’t that different.”

Noah scoffs. “I’ll try to remember that the next time my mom asks when she’s getting grandkids out of me. Like--okay, they’ve been perfectly content to let me camp out on this plateau I ended up on, for forever if that’s what I needed after the accident. No guilt trips, no gentle pushes forward, nothing. But I slip up and tell them I’m thinking about something, like, once, and they make this huge thing over it and blow it up and I’m standing here like ‘what the hell, guys?’” Noah scrubs his hands over his face and groans loudly, an indoor-volume scream. “I just--fuck, man, I don’t know. I’m not ready. To move on with my life. I didn’t even want to go on that interview, you know? I wanted Adam to talk me out of it.”

Ronan huffs a laugh, then he realizes Noah’s expression is deadly serious. “He’d never do that.”

“I know. Of course he, of all people, would tell me what I needed to hear and not of what I wanted.”

“That you’d regret not going on it?” Ronan guesses. “Your parents thought that, too.” Noah nods. It wouldn’t be unreasonable for Noah to have told or consulted his parents about any major life decision he was even considering making; Margot and David’s worrying isn’t unwarranted or unjustified, just a little overbearing, but the Czernys are as tightly knit as they come. “Sounds like you do regret it, though.”

“Does it matter?” Noah clearly wanted someone to have given him permission to not go to the interview, and no one did, so he went and now he’s miserable. Because it went well? Because it didn’t and he’s upset with wasting his time? With getting his hopes up even though he’d been afraid to go? 

Ronan shrugs. “You have to do what’s right by you, man. Fuck what anyone else says.”

Noah laughs, just once. “You would say that.” He clears his throat and returns to his book, avoiding meeting Ronan’s eye. “So, uh, yeah. I think Adam’s gonna be fine, eventually.”

Noah’s sudden backtracking to the earlier question is glaring, as though Ronan has accidentally tread too close to something Noah doesn’t want spoken aloud. There’s something unsaid hanging in the air. “Are you?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” The smoke has mostly disappeared, but there’s still something obscured and distant in Noah’s expression and Ronan, fluent in half-truths and lies of omission and the clandestine, sees the faint shadow of a secret in his dark eyes. Noah’s conspicuously untroubled smile would be perfectly convincing if Ronan didn’t recognize the subtle warning tucked into its corners. “I have everything I want right here.”

**Author's Note:**

> HMU on [my Tumblr](http://300foxholeway.tumblr.com) for more shenanigans and general fannish whinging, and check out my CiYH tags while you're there! Check out [the official Tumblr](http://color-in-your-hands.tumblr.com) for even more content--I always have my inboxes open for questions, comments, and the like!
> 
> [The official soundtrack](https://open.spotify.com/user/anonymouscatastrophe/playlist/1EZw9tEHHCJeeIanpd4cFH) for CiYH will periodically be updated as the story progresses and is available publicly on Spotify for those of you who are interested in hearing the songs that inspire and fuel each individual chapter.


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